 Another important issue in relation to agency concerns the nature of the relationship between institutional structure and the agency of institutional actors (Pleasants 2019). More specifically, a question arises as to whether or not one of these is logically prior to the other (or whether neither is). Thus some theorists, e.g. Emile Durkheim (1964) are held to conceive of structure as sui generis in relation to individual agency; and indeed, at least in the case of structuralists such as Althusser (1971), explanatory of human ‘agency’. The proposition of structuralists such as Althusser is that institutional structures (in the sense of a structure of social roles and social norms) are a basic, non-reducible feature of the world and the actions, values, self-images and the like of individual human agents must conform to these structures because individual agency, properly understood, is in fact constituted by such structures. An individual human agent is simply the repository of the roles and values of the institutions in which the ‘agent’ lives his or her life. Other theorists, e.g., arguably Max Weber (1949) and methodological individualists, conceive of institutional structure as simply an abstraction from the habitual and interdependent actions of individual human beings actors. Social reality is wholly compromised of individual human agents and their ongoing, patterned interactions; there is no structure as such. (Theorists such as Durkheim occupy a mid-position in which there is both sui generis structure and non-reducible agency; such theorists now confront the problem of conflict between structure and individual agency—which overrides which?) 