Nobody at the company remembered creating the rule.
Whenever a customer requested a refund above $500, employees sent the request to their supervisor. The supervisor forwarded it to the department manager. The department manager usually asked finance for confirmation before approving it.
The process could take three days.
One afternoon, a new employee named Kujo asked his supervisor, “Why does this need three approvals?”
His supervisor shrugged. “That’s how we do it.”
Kujo looked through the policy manual. The written rule required only one manager’s approval.
Somewhere over the years, an extra step had become two extra steps. What began as a habit had slowly turned into structure.
That is the kind of everyday situation structuration theory helps explain. Sociologist Anthony Giddens developed the theory to challenge the idea that people and social systems are completely separate. Rules and institutions shape what people do, but people also reproduce those rules every time they follow them. In other words, structure influences action, and repeated action recreates structure. Communication scholars later applied these ideas extensively to groups and organizations.
For readers who want the academic background, SAGE’s overview of group and organizational structuration theory is a useful starting point.
Nobody wrote the rule, but everyone followed it
Kujo started asking questions.
A longtime employee remembered that years earlier, the company had experienced several questionable refunds. A manager began reviewing larger requests more carefully. Another manager later added finance to the process. Employees learned that sending the request through several people was safer than risking criticism for approving something too quickly.
Eventually, nobody had to instruct anyone to follow the extra steps.
People taught the process to new employees. Supervisors expected it. Employees who skipped a step were told, “That’s not how we handle these.”
The practice had become normal.
This is what makes structuration theory so useful. Organizations are full of rules that do not live only in manuals. They live in repeated behavior.
A new employee learns this quickly. Official onboarding may explain what the organization says it does, while observation reveals how the organization actually works. As explored in The employee identification process: Before they say we, newcomers spend their first weeks watching how decisions really happen, who speaks freely, and which unwritten rules live quietly in the walls.
That is structure becoming visible.
Culture is repeated behavior
Companies like to describe culture with words such as integrity, excellence, collaboration, and innovation. Those words may matter, but culture becomes real through repetition.
If leaders say, “We encourage questions,” but people who challenge decisions are punished, employees learn the real rule.
If a company says mistakes are learning opportunities but every mistake becomes a public trial, employees learn the real rule.
If managers say people should take initiative but every decision requires approval, employees learn the real rule.
Repeated behavior eventually becomes more convincing than stated values.
That is why belonging develops through lived experience rather than slogans. When I work here becomes real makes a similar point: trust grows through ordinary moments when explanations, decisions, promises, and daily behavior begin matching what the organization claims to value.
Structuration theory helps explain why. People create the organization they experience by repeatedly participating in its practices.
Rules can constrain us and help us
It is tempting to think of structure as something negative: a bureaucracy, hierarchy, or obstacle.
But structure also makes cooperation possible.
Imagine an organization where nobody knows who approves expenses, how customer complaints are handled, or what happens when a safety problem appears. Complete freedom would quickly become confusion.
Rules create predictability. Roles create responsibility. Procedures help people coordinate their actions.
The problem is not structure itself. The question is whether the existing structure still helps people accomplish the work.
Kujo’s refund process once had a purpose. The additional oversight responded to a real problem. But the emergency response became permanent even after the original circumstances changed.
Organizations often work this way. Temporary meetings become permanent meetings. A report created for one executive continues years after that executive leaves. An approval added after one mistake becomes standard procedure for everyone.
The practice survives because people keep reproducing it.
Communication keeps structure alive
Consider how often structure is reinforced through ordinary sentences:
“Run that by me first.”
“We always copy the director.”
“Don’t bring that up in the meeting.”
“That needs to go through channels.”
“That’s just how it works here.”
These sentences may seem small, but they teach people the rules of the system.
Symbols do the same thing. Titles, office locations, seating arrangements, meeting invitations, and who gets copied on an email all communicate where authority sits. As discussed in Symbols speak before words, people interpret objects, routines, and environments long before anyone formally explains what they mean.
In this way, communication does more than happen inside an organization. Communication helps produce the organization.
People still have agency
If repeated behavior creates structure, then people are not completely trapped by the system.
They can also change it.
Kujo asked his supervisor whether they could test the written policy instead of the inherited routine. They reviewed the original requirement with finance and discovered that one manager could approve most refunds while unusual cases could still receive additional review.
The company changed the process.
At first, employees continued sending requests through the old path. Habit was stronger than the announcement.
So the managers changed their own behavior. When someone sent an unnecessary approval request, they returned it and said, “You have authority to handle this.” Team meetings reinforced the new expectation. Managers stopped rewarding excessive escalation.
After several weeks, the new practice began to feel normal.
That is structuration in action.
The structure changed because people repeatedly acted differently.
Why change announcements often fail
Leaders sometimes announce a new culture and expect the organization to transform.
“We are becoming more innovative.”
“We are empowering employees.”
“We want faster decisions.”
But the old practices remain.
Employees are told to take initiative, yet managers still punish mistakes. Teams are told to collaborate, yet incentives reward individual competition. Leaders say decisions should move faster, yet approval chains remain untouched.
The announcement changes. The structure does not.
This is why meetings must stay focused on the actual behavior and decision rather than drifting into slogans. The law of focus argues that every room needs a center and that useful communication keeps returning attention to the issue, consequence, and work that matter.
If a leader wants culture to change, the useful question is not only, “What should we tell people?”
It is, “What will people need to start doing differently on Monday morning?”
Power is part of the structure
Not everyone has equal ability to change a rule.
A junior employee may notice a bad process but lack authority to remove it. A manager may be able to change a team practice but not a company-wide policy. Senior leaders control resources and consequences that shape what other people believe is possible.
Structuration theory includes power because rules and resources affect who can act and how easily they can act.
But formal authority is not the only form of influence. Experienced employees reinforce norms. Respected coworkers shape expectations. People with specialized knowledge can change how work gets done.
Perception also strengthens this influence. Once someone develops a reputation for being trustworthy, difficult, careful, innovative, or powerful, that reputation begins affecting how others respond before the person even speaks. The law of managed perception explores how repeated signals eventually become part of how work and credibility are interpreted.
Structure lives partly in those expectations.
How to use this theory in real life
Start by looking for sentences that begin with, “We always…” or “You have to…”
Then ask why.
Sometimes the answer will reveal a valuable rule. Keep it.
Sometimes nobody will remember. Investigate it.
Next, compare the written rule with the lived rule. Policies may say one thing while daily behavior teaches another.
Then look at repetition. What behavior gets rewarded? What gets corrected? What happens after someone challenges the usual way?
If you want to change the structure, change repeated practice. One speech will rarely do it. People need to see a different behavior become normal.
Finally, remember that you participate in structures too. Every time you repeat an unnecessary rule simply because “that’s how we do it,” you help keep it alive.
Watch out for this
Structuration theory is broad and can feel abstract. Not every organizational problem can be explained by repeated communication alone. Laws, technology, budgets, physical resources, markets, and formal authority also constrain behavior.
The theory does not say individuals can simply decide to change any system they dislike.
Its practical value is more modest and more useful: systems are not only things imposed on people. They are also maintained through what people repeatedly do.
That means some structures are more changeable than they appear.
One thing to remember
Kujo did not discover a bad employee. He discovered a habit that had become a system.
Nobody had deliberately designed the three-step refund process. People had simply repeated it long enough that it began to feel permanent.
That is the lesson of structuration theory.
Structure shapes behavior, but behavior also creates structure.
If you want to understand a culture, watch what people repeatedly do.
If you want to change a culture, change what people repeatedly practice.
Reflection question
What rule in your workplace, family, or community exists mainly because everyone keeps repeating it and what might happen if someone thoughtfully questioned it?
