There are no signifying practices; signification should rather be understood as an integral element of social practices in general. (p. 39)

Subsequently Durkheim came to modify his notion of constraint, stressing the moral nature of social facts, and thereby separating physical constraints from the sorts of pressures exerted by society over its members. It is this 'later Durkheim' -- who recognized that moral phenomena are both positively motivating as well as constraining in his original sense -- who was the main inspiration for Parsons. Parsons's 'action frame of reference' is much more indebted to Durkheim than to the others whose work he claimed to have synthesized in The structure of social action. Parsons understands action in relation to what he calls 'voluntarism', and has sought to reconcile the latter with a recognition of the 'emergent properties' of social systems. The reconciliation is achieved through the influence of normative values on two levels: as elements of personality and as core components of society. As 'internalized' in personality, values provide the motives or need-dispositions which impel the conduct of the actor; while on the level of the social system, as institutionalized norms, values form a more consisens that serves to integrate the totality... This effectively excludes certain essential components ot the theory of action, as I shall conceptualize it later. (p. 51-2)

Definition of 'agency'

'Action' or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together, but to continuous flow of conduct. We may define action ... as involving a 'stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the-world. (p. 55)

Definition of 'structure'

As I shall employ it, 'structure' refers to 'structural property', or more exactly to 'structuring property, structuring properties providing the 'binding' of time and space in social systems. I argues that these properties can be understood as rules and reources, recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems. (p. 64)