of some pre-planned social actions, not automatic evolutionary response. Unlike natural scientists, sociologists have to interpret a social world which is already interpreted by the actors that inhabit it. According to Giddens, there is a duality of structure by which social practice, the principal unit of investigation, has both a structural and an agency-component. The structural environment constrains individual behaviour, but it also makes it possible. He also noted the existence of a specific form of a social cycle. Once sociological concepts are formed, they filter back into everyday world and change the way people think. Because social actors are reflexive and monitor the ongoing flow of activities and structural conditions, they adapt their actions to their evolving understandings. As a result, social scientific knowledge of society will actually change human activities. Giddens calls this two-tiered, interpretive and dialectical relationship between social scientific knowledge and human practices the double hermeneutic. Giddens also stressed the importance of power, which is means to ends, and hence is directly involved in the actions of every person. Power, the transformative capacity of people to change the social and material world, is closely shaped by knowledge and space-time. In New Rules, Giddens specifically wrote: Sociology is not about a pre-given universe of objects, the universe is being constituted—or produced by—the active doings of subjects. The production and reproduction of society thus has to be treated as a skilled performance on the part of its members. The realm of human agency is bounded. Individuals produce society, but they do so as historically located actors, and not under conditions of their own choosing. Structures must be conceptualised not only as constraints upon human agency, but as enablers as well. Processes of structuration involve an interplay of meanings, norms and power. The sociological observer cannot make social life available as phenomenon for observation independently of drawing upon his knowledge of it as a resource whereby he constitutes it as a topic for investigation. Immersion in a form of life is the necessary and only means whereby an observer is able to generate such characterisations. Sociological concepts thus obey a double hermeneutic. In sum, the primary tasks of sociological analysis are the following: The hermeneutic explication and mediation of divergent forms of life within descriptive metalanguages of social science. Explication of the production and reproduction of society as the accomplished outcome of human agency. Structuration Giddens' theory of structuration