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Structuralism in social science was popularized by the French structuralists, Claude Lévi-Strauss especially. In search for social structures he came to the conclusion that they originate in human minds. Moreover, according to him people across history and cultures shared the same mental structure, with all other structural aspects of human civilisation (myths, thought, social rules, organization of houses in a village) stemming from it. This approach, was criticized for its ahistorism, universalism, as well as extreme holism -- with individuals not being able to influence the fundamental aspects of human civilisation -- the eternal immutable structure. After this criticism, structuralism in social science lost its popularity.   

Recently, however, structuralism is gaining currency again, this time in the philosophy of mathematics and physics. This "new" structuralism turns out to be at the fundamental level very similar to the social science structuralism. If one understands structured to stand for regular, one must ask whether any science should look for anything but structures (regularities, patterns). Perhaps social science might attempt to locate structures within its realm anew? After all, it was the supposition of a single structure placed in all human minds which was criticized at French structuralism, not the search for structures as such.

I propose that structures in the social realm occur at several interrelated levels. Agreeing with  Lévi-Strauss that human mind operates in structural terms and that it is humans who structure most of what we consider as social, I do not endorse the postulate of the single structure. People are heterogeneous and their mental structures differ; secondly, everyone thinks and acts based on many diverse structures. Next, there exists second domain of structures: the domain of praxis -- of actual human behaviour and its results. The two domains interact through an ongoing feed-back mechanism. Perceiving structures in the domain of praxis makes people to modify their mental structural make-up; this, in turn, leads to modified structural performance in the domain of praxis. I shall demonstrate this on the example of the contemporary social ontology of Tony Lawson.

This feed-back transformation mechanism is shaped by a third sort of structure -- the physical network of actual individuals interactions. The forth domain of structures harbours the macro behavioural patterns, which are not observable from the vantage point of our everyday interaction, and which constitute the area of interest of social scientists.