structure and agency

I have just a few common-sense observations and reflections to make about this oft discussed and theorised concern  - structure and agency.

In the literature it's always wonderful to see the little person (aka - the agent) overcome or subvert the negative and even tyrannical  impact of the society or the institution (aka - the structure). Of course all of this plays itself out in complex and diverse ways and as Margaret Archer and other theorists (like Bourdieu, who a good friend reminded me about recently) have shown us, the relationship between the structure and the agent is also interceded by culture. And I won't even try to pretend that I know anything about more psychologically informed understandings of these interactions. BUT theory-schemory when it comes to trying to understand your own place in an organisation and why it is you behave and react to events,  incidents and people in the way you do. It's safe to say that I have enough of a common-sense understanding (and experience to back this up) to know that the environment that I live and work in will affect me as a person and in someways impact on, and direct how I response to what I encounter. I'm fast realising however, that irrespective how agentive you are as a person, you are still operating within a broader system that WILL either constrain or accentuate your level of agency. Also the conditions in environment can distort your ability to realise your agentive potential. It can also act to reframe and reconstruct your inability to use this agentive quality as a personal failing and in so doing turn the spotlight off the features inherent in the structure that directly act against this agentive potential. As I write this I imagine that somewhere in the literature, someone has already described this process in more elaborate and eloquent ways, and with just the right sprinkling of theoretical concepts and constructions to give it the necessary air of credibility and validity. I wonder though if anyone has ever written about how being caught in this process actually makes you feel, and how understanding these processes, no matter how rudimentary that understanding, offers no buffer against the person impact on its detrimental effects.