Relational Agency under Constraint: Rethinking the Structure–Agency Debate through Urban Poverty

This article develops the concept of relational agency under constraint to move beyond voluntarist and dualist models within the structure–agency debate. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of persistent poverty in Dutch urban contexts, it integrates empirical evidence with a relational theoretical framework. Building on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capital, Archer’s morphogenetic approach, Emirbayer and Mische’s temporally embedded agency, and Lamont’s work on symbolic boundaries, agency is reconceptualised as emergent through social relations yet bounded by structural constraints. The article demonstrates how residents facing long-term poverty act in morally, temporally, and relationally embedded ways—navigating formal and informal economies, negotiating territorial stigma through boundary work, and coping with the symbolic violence of welfare bureaucracy. Agency is shown not as mere free will nor as a structural epiphenomenon, but as a contextually enacted capacity shaped by history and inequality. This advances the relational turn in sociology by illuminating agency’s structural embeddedness.