What is the difference between structural and interactionist theories?

This is quite a crucial area of sociology to understand as a general understanding of the type of theory will ultimately enable you to understand the aim of their views. Structural theories are the most common, they adopt a top down approach of the world and see society as influencing individuals. This is accomplished through institutions such as the education system, police etc who infiltrate their ideologies that control and determine how individuals should act. For example, Marxism adopts a structural approach by insisting the ruling class perpetuate their ideologies on the population in the education system by educating pupils to believe in what they call the myth of meritocracy. Convincing lower-class pupils that their underachievement is down to their own laziness. Whereas interactionist approaches view individuals and their interactions as creating society, by studying the meanings we attach to symbols and things which differs in different parts of the world. For example, interactionists adopt a labelling approach to argue that certain social groups underachieve in school because of the labels they are given which leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, structural theories view individuals as puppets of society and interactionists view individuals as the creators.