Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 1969"

Sport, culture, and society : a reader on the sociology of sport

Abstract: Few would deny that sports and games occupy a high place in the values of' many people in most contemporary societies. Given this, to say nothing of the problems posed, for example, by the ideologies which stress the characterbuilding functions of sports, their role as a medium for the peaceful discharge of aggression or as an agency for promoting international peace and understanding, one might have expected that the sociological study of sport would at least be moderately advanced even if it was not regarded as one of the central areas of the subject. Surprisingly, however, sport has not so far been the subject of systematic investigation in sociology or, indeed, in any other academic discipline. It does not even rank as a peripheral area of study. Perhaps this almost total neglect reflects the degree to which sociology, history and related subjects remain biased by a puritanical value system which values work more highly than leisure and which, correspondingly, directs attention to the former rather than the latter as an area of problems which merit serious research? Perhaps it stems from the fact that only recently have social problems such as 'soccer hooliganism' become apparent in this field? But, whatever is the case in this respect, it remains true that the study of sports and games is neglected as a field of academic research. There are one or

“Symbolic Bureaucracy”: A Case Study of a Social Welfare Agency

Abstract: This paper is concerned with certain ideas about bureaucracy preselnted by Weber and qualified and expanded upon by Blau. Based upon the information gathered in a year-long participant observation study of "The Single Men's Unit" of a public welfare department from February 1959 to February 1960, during which time he was employed as a "social caseworker," the author has introduced the notion of "symbolic bureaucracy." The discussion, which is centered around this concept, seriously questions whether Blau's "unofficial change" and "adjustive development" will suffice to save Weber. It seems more likely to the author that the introduction of the concept of unofficial change, if it serves to rescue Weber's "ideal type," succeeds in doing so only at the serious risk of losing bureaucracy. B ureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations. Individual performances are allocated to functionaries who have specialized training and who by constant practice learn more and more. The 'objective' discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to Calculable Rules and 'without regard for persons.'"'

Bakan’s Bi-Polar Constructs: Agency and Communion

Abstract: This paper concerns itself with a presentation of Bakan’s bi-polar constructs—agency and communion—and the Inventory purporting to measure these. Agency is seen as individualism, separation, selfishness, alienation, mastery, denial, masculine and a correlate of dysfunction. Communion is viewed as alterocentric, participation, community, mystery, affirmation of feeling, feminine and the mitigator of agency. Differential response to the Inventory by well-differentiated groups reflects on the credibility of Bakan’s key theoretical assumption that the behavioral correlates of unmitigated agency were worthy of the psychologist’s concern.

I. ‘Mine’ and the family of human imaginings

Abstract: This note attempts first to broaden the investigation of ties expressed by ‘my’ and ‘mine’, which was initiated in ‘The Concept of “Mine”; ‘ (Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 3). Socially accepted types of use ties (active and passive), worth ties and other sorts are distinguished from the previously noted ties of ownership, agency, etc. These further distinctions of ties, it is argued, also deserve the attention of philosophers and conceptually oriented social scientists. The analysis of ‘mine’ is then applied to the much disputed concept of ‘imagining’: some major clusters of divergent facts and phenomena called human imaginings are mapped and related to ‘mine’.

Agency, Attention, and Choice

Abstract: In trying to understand what human beings are and what they do, one of the most fundamental and useful distinctions is between things which happen to us and things which happen because of us, between what we do and what is done to us, between ourselves as agents and ourselves as patients. A third distinction is also sometimes required. Sometimes we need to think of ourselves as transeunt or intermediate causes, as links in an extended chain of causes and effects which originates before us, passes through us, and ends beyond us. Many philosophers of deterministic persuasion have attempted to erode away the concept of agency by insisting that all that men do and all that they are can be explained as the consequence of causal conditions which lie ultimately in our heredity and environment and which have operated upon us and within us to make us exactly what we are and to make us do exactly what we do, so that in the final analysis all that you or I do is merely the outcome of that which is done to us. Determinists want to insist that at best we are only transeunt causes.1

Arguing with Songs: An anthropological approach to music, ideology, and gendered subjectivity

Abstract: This article seeks to problematize the anthropological tendency to view music as an autonomous force, suggesting that it may be better viewed as a discursive medium. It draws on existing anthropological, sociological, and musicological literature to argue that analogously to language and sound, the locus of the power of music lies less in its form and more in the various ways in which it is produced, circulated, consumed, and performed in culturally specific ways. Gendered ideology is located in these concrete, material actions of musical production, circulation, consumption, and performance; hence these musical activities serve to constitute the gendered subject in relation to dominant ideological power structures. Ultimately, by suggesting a way in which anthropologists could think productively with issues of music, gender, power, and agency, the article highlights the need to narrow the perceived disciplinary distance between anthropology and ethnomusicology.