Disturbing Concepts: from Action Theory to a Generative Concept of Agency (original) (raw)
Related papers
Agency as an Explanatory Key: Theoretical Issues (with Richard Biernacki)
In philosophy agency designates the inalienable ability of individuals to make choices about their conduct that are not determined by the environment. In empirical social science, however, agency designates not autonomous free will but the launching of patterned action that surpasses constraints in the setting and that directs the course of institutional change. Many social scientists have limited the explanatory task they take on to show that agency is an indispensable part of ongoing social life. They have also reasoned that portrayals of institutional structures alone or even of the cultural resources that accompany them, such as shared scripts for social interaction, are inadequate for explaining important changes. It is typical therefore to feature agency as a logically necessary contributor. Study of agency can be improved by specifying affirmatively when and how action is in decisive ways organized independently of the constraints in the setting and this sense transcends them. This sharper requirement for positive demonstration of how agency brought about change is satisfied by reconstructing the actors' independent invention of a new master problem that guides their conduct. This promising approach to explaining transformative action has disseminated from study of artistic and scientific innovation to that of institutional change.
Wherein Lies the Potential of Agency? (2015)
N.B. Short essay completed as part of the doctoral seminar "Architecture et modernité II: Espace(s), perception, conception" given by Caroline Dionne, PhD, (ALICE Laboratory in 2015). Many of the texts cited were discussed collectively in the seminar. Modified following comments by Dr. Dionne.
" Agency " as a Red Herring in Social Theory
The central argument of this article is that there is no fact of the matter, no evidence , however tentative or questionable, that will serve adequately to identify actions " chosen " or " determined " for the purposes of sociological theory. This argument will be developed with reference to the two theorists of the greatest importance in advocating the sociological value of the concept of agency: Talcott Parsons, with his " voluntaristic theory of action, " set the scene for the whole agency and structure debate in modern sociology, and Anthony Giddens, in his theory of structuration, provides the most comprehensive recent account. Both theorists put forward grounds and justifications for their use of the concepts of " choice " and " agency, " but it will be argued here that in the last analysis, none of them has any sociological merit. The concept of agency occupies a central position in much current social theory, wherein it is employed in many and various ways. The present article is concerned only with that part of the literature that specifically refers to human agency. In this literature, the concept of agency is contrasted with that of social structure wherefrom it derives its meaning relationally. " Agency " stands for the freedom of the contingently acting subject over and against the constraints that are thought to derive from enduring social structures. To the extent that human beings have agency, they may act independently of and in opposition to structural constraints, and/or may (re)constitute social structures through their freely chosen actions. To the extent that they lack agency, human beings are conceived of as automata, following the dictates of social structures and exercising no choice in what they do. That, at any rate, is the commonest way of contrasting agency and structure in the context of what has become known as the structure/ agency debate.
Master thesis, 2016
The last years have seen the emergence of different theories that attempt to destabilize the notion of the sovereign human subject. Two of the most prominent theories in this respect are Actor-Network Theory (ANT) on the one hand, and the so-called 4E approaches in cognitive science on the other hand. Despite coming from entirely different backgrounds, both theories arrive at rather similar-looking philosophical conclusions and positions. Most importantly, both in their own way aim to describe how humans are fundamentally situated and embedded in their own particular environment or network, which in terms of their philosophical positions is combined with a rejection of the subject-object dichotomy, a monist and relationist outlook, and a posthumanism providing a new perspective on the relation between humans and their environment. The aim of this thesis then is to systematically relate the two approaches to each other in terms of the concept of agency. For both the 4E approaches and ANT, the concept has the function of showing how humans are not the sovereign, rational actors mastering their environment modern science often claims them to be, but are just as much shaped by their environment as vice versa. By comparing both approaches in terms conceptualization of agency, the results of this thesis have implications for studying agency in a relational, non-anthropocentric way.
Action without Agency and Natural Human Action: Resolving a Double Paradox
The Philosophical Challenge from China, 2015
In the philosophy of action, it is generally understood that action presupposes an agent performing or guiding the action. Action is also generally understood as distinct form the kind of motion that happens in nature. Together these common perspectives on action rule out both action without agency and natural action. And yet, there are times when action can seem qualitatively both natural and lacking a sense of agency. Recently, David Velleman, referring to work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Zhuangzi, has considered the possibility of agency without agency. In this chapter, I build on Velleman's work and posit the notion of self-organization (which in the natural sciences serves as the basis for many familiar kinds of motion in nature) to also serve as the basis for human behavior. If action is a variety of behavior, conceiving of human behavior as fundamentally an instance of self-organization unifies human action with nature from the beginning and allows us to conceptualize the possibility of human action without presupposing the necessity of agency. I go on to entertain three types of human behavior in which the sense of agency is significantly absent and which progressively qualify as action.