The Co‐inherence of Natures: An Ontological Extension of Strong Structuration Theory

Abstract

The participation of living organisms in social structural dynamics raises a question contemporary social theory has only begun to answer: What ontological vocabulary can specify how the natures of different kinds of beings coinhere within concrete structural situations? This article addresses that question by extending Rob Stones's strong structuration theory (SST) and integrating Ted Benton's critical naturalism with conceptual resources drawn from the Maximian‐Palamite tradition, namely the apparatus of nature‐as‐energy ( physis‐energeia ), hypostasis, hexis and perichōrēsis . Philosophically reconstructed in recent scholarship, these concepts are mobilised not as confessional commitments but as a social ontological grammar, one that resists both the monism of flat ontologies, in which stable natures dissolve into a single process, and the dualism of nature and society that has long structured social thought. So equipped, the theorist‐researcher can analyse how ontologically different natures, principally human and animal, co‐inhere within structural conjunctures, each actively present through its own energies and dispositions, without either collapsing their differences or merely juxtaposing them. The framework is applied heuristically, through theorist's pattern analysis, to intensive pig farming in the European Union, where antibiotic resistance, welfare‐driven regulatory change and zoonotic emergence are analysed as coinherent outcomes in which dominated organisms affect, constrain and sometimes destabilise the structures that dominate them. The contribution is to demonstrate that a philosophical tradition developed to think the unity‐in‐difference of natures yields resources both rigorous and productive for the analysis of the structured situations in which, increasingly, many of the most pressing questions of social life are now posed.