The basic claim of the structuralist theorists was that a very wide range (perhaps all) of human activity, from economic interaction to literature, could be understood as being coded like language, bound by rules analogous to grammar and syntax….Its major weakness was its inability to provide any satisfactory theoretical account of historical or other development, which, however much part of the despised empirical universe, could not altogether be ignored. Consequently its intellectual standing was soon challenged by a much more theoretically powerful successor, Poststructuralism.
Excerpt from Postmodernism and History (Palgrave Macmillan)