Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 1983"

Long-Term Contracts and Moral Hazard

Abstract: This article extends the economic theory of agency to a simple class of multiperiod situations. In this context we study the role of long-term contracts in controlling moral hazard problems. We characterize the optimal long-term contract, and show that even when the "environment" is separable over time, the agent's compensation in one period will depend on his performance in that period and his performance in the prior periods.

Reason and Morality

Abstract: "Most modern philosophers attempt to solve the problem of morality from within the epistemological assumptions that define the dominant cultural perspective of our age. Alan Gewirth's "Reason and Morality" is a major work in this ongoing enterprise. Gewirth develops, with patience and skill, what he calls a 'modified naturalism' in which morality is derived by logic alone from the concept of action. . . . I think that the publication of "Reason and Morality" is a major event in the history of moral philosophy. It develops with great power a new and exciting position in ethical naturalism. No one, regardless of philosophical stance, can read this work without an enlargement of mind. It illuminates morality and agency for all." E. M. Adams, "The Review of Metaphysics" "This is a fascinating study of an apparently intractable problem. Gewirth has provided plenty of material for further discussion, and his theory deserves serious consideration. He is always aware of possible rejoinders and argues in a rigorous manner, showing a firm grasp of the current state of moral and political philosophy." "Mind ""

Ideology and Agency in the Process of Schooling.

Abstract: The concept of ideology is interrogated as the necessary basis for a more fully developed theory of emancipatory pedagogy It is argued that within the Marxist tradition ideology has largely been d

Autonomy and Integrity in Kant’s Aesthetics

Abstract: "That the imagination should be both free and yet of itself conformable to law, that is, that it should carry autonomy with it, is a contradiction."1 So Kant writes to express as a paradox the epistemological problem that the feel ing on which an aesthetic judgment is based must be free of the constraint provided by determinate concepts, for otherwise there will be no reason why it should be pleasurable, yet must also be subject to some kind of rule, for otherwise the claim of universal validity which this judgment asserts will be irrational. And so understood, the remark is entirely rhetorical, for it is the express purpose of Kant's main argument in the Critique of Aesthetic Judg ment to show that this conception of the judgment of taste is coherent rather than contradictory. But taken from its intended context, the remark need not be rhetorical, for it can be seen as an expression of competing demands for aesthetic integrity, or demands for individual freedom and social agreement in the creation and reception of art which, unlike the two epistemological constraints on aesthetic judgment, cannot be simultaneously satisfied but which instead introduce a permanent source of instability into the history of art and taste. Indeed, it is even fitting that Kant's remark has to be taken out of context to be given this interpretation, for although Kant lays the theoretical basis for such a picture of art history he also tries to suppress its consequence and to avert the destruction of the eighteenth-century ideal of aesthetic stability which is its inevitable outcome. The tension which must arise on Kant's theory of taste may be seen as one between two competing demands for aesthetic integrity precisely because the concept of integrity has two distinct senses. On the one hand, it connotes a property of individual action or character: individual agency possesses in tegrity when it is determined independently of anything except principles free ly chosen by the agent but steadfastly by those principles. In a word, integrity in this sense is what Kant calls autonomy. On the other hand, the concept of integrity also has a sense in which it connotes not so much the autonomy of individual agency as the unity, coherence, or completeness of a whole such as an organism or an organization. It is in this sense of the term that a bridge, for instance, might be said to possess structural integrity.2 Kant has included in his theory of taste demands for integrity in each of these senses. In his ac

The Politics of Political Science: The Case of Comparative Legislative Studies

Abstract: Politics is a feature of any associational activity but political scientists seldom systematically examine politics within their own profession. An account of the movement, essentially in the US in the 1970s, for the development of comparative legislative studies, affords a convenient case-study. An outcome of Title IX of the Foreign Assistance Act, its examination entails uncovering different strands of interest and of doctrine in relations between government (specifically the US Agency for International Development) and the academic community and also within that community.

Language, Education, and Reproduction in Wales

Abstract: Traditionally, the study of bilingualism has always taken the minority language as its “problem.” Once defined, the problem was conventionally couched in terms of the individual, in the sense that it was seen to confront individuals rather than to form an inherent part of the social structure. The tendency to view bilingual education within a framework of individual liberalism was derived from this orientation. Recently, however, one of the striking developments in the sociology of education has been a sharp shift of focus from viewing education as an agency for social mobility and the differential conferment of rewards to a reappraisal of the ideological potency of education as an agency of social and cultural control. Although, to our knowledge, bilingualism has not been discussed within this framework, there is no reason why it cannot be, and indeed it can be claimed that viewing bilingualism in terms of a liberal philosophy is itself an element of social control on the part of the dominant language group.

Adult Learning and Library Helping

Abstract: HELPING DESIGNED FOR adult learners in libraries is more than a task or a duty; it is an idea, an act of the imagination. True, both the helper and the person helped are present in time and space, but they are also part of an intangible act that occurs far beyond immediate needs and words, an act of reaching out to touch the pervasive continuities of adult intellectual life. “Helping,” as it is used in these pages, is much like family touching and friendship, especially those affective conversations of inquiry and response that inform our lives, shaping them by invisible actions and silent messages. These intangible acts occur hundreds of thousands of times each day between strangers in public rooms, in the presence of informing tools and educative processes. It is not useful to complicate, mystify or over-rationalize these acts, but it is valuable to speculate about the meanings and conditions of the library helping process. Helping is a common, and yet remarkable, communicative, prosocial act, having dimensions, metaphors, obstacles, and continuities. Clearly, to discuss these aspects of library helping is to go beyond standard discourse having to do with public service. To serve and to help are different acts, or different conceptions of agency, in the library. The first may be seen as reactive, the second as proactive. Understanding the difference between serving and helping has deep implications for all library interactions with adult learners and for all librarians who choose to be helpers.

Work-Related Perceptions of Social Workers Versus Administrators: More Grist for the "Is Social Work a Profession?" Mill

Abstract: The work-related perceptions of 683 employees of a federally funded public assistance agency were examined by occupational classification. The results show that persons employed as social workers report distinctively different patterns of attitudes and values than do those employed as administrators. These distinctions were most dramatic for the younger members of each group. The overall results fail to refute previous predictions of an evolving anc critical duality in the field of social work. From the time that Flexner (1915) first raised the issue of the professional status of social work, writers in every decade have debated the topic. Some, like Flexner, have denied that social work is a profession, while others (e.g., Greenwood, 1957) have awarded it full professional status. Still others have created such labels as "semi-profession," "mid-level profession" or "emerging profession" to describe where social work lies in the middle ground (see Leighninger, 1978, for a review). The concern with this issue has been so great that Leighninger (1978) concludes that much of social work's history can best be understood in light of attempts at professionalism and, apparently, attempts to resolve the matter of the field's professional status. Yet in spite of the attention this topic has historically received, an acceptable resolution does not seem to be at hand. Even in the 1970's, writers at the same school of social welfare (Leighninger, 1978; Specht, 1972) reached dramatically different conclusions with regard to both the present professional status of social work and its foreseeable future. In what is perhaps the most negative appraisal, Specht (1972) argued that social work was "undergoing a fundamental change and may even be approaching its denouement." In support of this position, Specht examined a number of ideological trends (activism, anti-individualism, communalism, and environmental determinism) each

Varieties of individualism

Abstract: ions like these demand fleshing out, and a great deal more argument than this review could permit. Suffice it to say that Tuan's own account is reasonably concrete without, however, letting us forget that individualism is a project with a structure or set of assumptions which make it distinct. Tuan anchors his thoughts about it in a history of responses to the growing slippage between self and role, the "I" and its "me's," particularly since the Renaissance. The "I," he suggests, becomes experienced as both ally in man's navigation of an increasingly fragmented world and as harsh taskmaster when mobility precipitates a sense of guilt. Although this distinction tends to coincide with social classa fact that the author does not pursuethe richest reflections on selfhood occur when it is experienced within a single mind. Thus is poor Hamlet stretched, between demands that he live up to his position and demands that he live up This content downloaded from 207.46.13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 04:23:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms STEPHEN: VARIETIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 123 to the enterprise of questioning his own relation to it. In a figure which summarizes such divisions within the Renaissance ego, Tuan asserts that the palaces which "proclaimed wealth and individuality"a "flaunting of differences on the public stage"also served as facades, behind which men explored an inner world brought forth and also threatened by this very public achievement. One of the most striking expressions of this is the fact that beginning in the sixteenth centurywith its dramatic increases in mobility, most especially in England but also in Italy and Francethe word "society" makes its appearance in literature and speech, as a contrast term to the older word "nation." Whereas the nation is what people are, "society" comes to mean what they face: an arrangement of obstacles or opportunities which, as creations of human will, may resist or give way to the individual will. It is worth pondering whether those who lived through this transition, like Machiavelli or Montaigne, were not more sensitive than ourselves to the fact that social "science" is the self-understanding, even self-advertisement, of this particular new settinga setting whose rules and roles science helps to create, justify, and reproduceand therefore were not justified in their ambivalence about freeing social science from its philosophic heritage. At any rate, each gives us the elements for a notion of how the self relates to its roles that is very different from what modern science presumes and what "society" in the new sense requires. For Machiavelli, individualism is made possible and can only be sustained by a hidden infrastructure of shared practices and codesan infrastructure which, he warns, the further expansion of individualism may undermine. Machiavelli suggests that when the self is regarded to be given in advance of its various ends and rolesas in the individualist viewfreedom and person identity will require a continuous excercise of will, a reaching out to grasp or hold the ends and roles which the self would possess. However, to equate identity with the scope and reach of the will (as Machiavelli himself equates it in The Prince) is finally to render it arbitrary, since there is no possibility for reflecting on the creature that is doing the choosing. The way out of this impasse is to perceive an entirely different way that one can become and affirm oneself, which is a central theme of The DiscoursesMachiavelli^ counterpiece to The Prince. In this experienceof what might be called the "constitutive selfmy ends and roles are given in advance, and the problem becomes not overcoming a distance between myself and them through acts of will, but instead, gaining some distance on what I am, sorting out what is really "me" from all that is "mine" and that impinges indiscriminately on my identity. Where the ends of my self are given this way , the relevant question becomes a cognitive onenot "What shall I choose?" but "Who am I?" and "Which of these attachments and purposes are truly my own?" Here the self is the product rather than the premise of its This content downloaded from 207.46.13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 04:23:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 124 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY agency, where agency consists less in mobilizing the will than in a process of self-reflection which is never complete and which extends through a lifetime. The self, in a word, becomes open to its own redefinition. Its process of reflecting on a framework of ends that is distinguishable from and in important respects prior to the wills and sentiments of individuals within it Machiavelli perceives as the essence of politics.7 Montaigne too distinguishes an identity that I choose from an identity that I thoughtfully discover. But what Machiavelli in large measure only tells us, Montaigne shows through an autobiography. There the voluntaristic self is forever being played off against a self whose boundaries are not fixed but rather re-described; this self, as Montaigne discovered through his friendships, allows for the possibility of a community as the subject, not just the object, of shared aspiration. At times, Montaigne gives us a picture of himself as a kaleidoscope of competing loyalties and roles, as attributes that he "faces" and must espouse or relinquish. More often, though, the very boundaries of this "he" are shown to have been found only through reflection on a character constituted through a history of relationships. Because of this, Montaigne can mean it seriously when he says that he has had friends who know him better than he knew himself, and to whom he went for greater self-knowledge. Machiavelli and Montaigne are among those who give us the ingredients for a serious theory of community, one not of individuals who converge out of altruism or fellow-feeling but rather one constitutive of what they are. But in his overview of the modern period, Tuan prefers with good reason to lay the emphasis on the vicissitudes of a more mobile and "unencumbered" self. In fact, some of the richest sections of Segmented Worlds and Self try to show how greater mobility, by allowing and even requiring the segregation of audiences, leads to a range of new theories and practices of pretense. From such "impression management" and the emotional effort required to sustain it, springs in turn a growing interest in man's inner world as a phantasmagoric drama of conflicting parts. These processes deserve to be much better explored by sociologists as well as historians and literary critics in whose hands they usually are left. Simmel, for example, who perceived the self as arising "at the intersection of overlapping social circles," once suggested that for members of complex societies, most of the self must in any given situation be kept suspended. Feelings and perceptions not relevant to the task at hand must be relegated to the margins of awareness. While such figure-ground perception is characteristic of humans generally, it is likely that an advanced division of laborwhere segmental involvements threaten to keep a person's various aspects permanently out of touchprovides the setting for a discovery of a host of other, This content downloaded from 207.46.13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 04:23:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms STEPHEN: VARIETIES OF INDIVIDUALISM 125 "unconscious" selves behind the identity activated for each task. Beginning with Montaigne, but accelerating dramatically in such contexts as prerevolutionary France, we see emerge those figures of fragmentationthe "unhappy consciousness," "divided self," and poseurwhose dissociated experience later becomes conceptualized as within a personal unconscious, rather than in the external social

Aristotle's Metaphysics of Nature Sarah Waterlow: Nature, Change, and Agency in Aristotle's Physics. A Philosophical Study. Pp. 269. Oxford University Press, 1982. £17.50.

Abstract: is not what we get. Instead it is a fairly familiar account of Aristotle's theory of science with the customary, and to my mind mistaken, reference to 'intuitive induction' a formulation which fails to distinguish the different, if connected, notions of epagoge and nous. It is only in this context too that we receive any account of Aristotle's essentialism which Edel seems to see merely as part of a theory of classification. This is all rather shallow. On the other hand, in the chapter on 'The theory of practice' there are some good comments on such vexed questions as the interpretation of ta pros ta tele at EN 1112 b 12 and elsewhere, and about the place of' ought' in Aristotle's ethics. It is therefore a mixed bag. It is a large and comprehensive presentation of Aristotle's ideas to which a general reader might turn if he wants that, and receive some profit. Aristotle is, however, more than a formulator of networks of ideas and for that reason something, perhaps a great deal, of the essential spirit of Aristotle's philosophy is missing. Perhaps the ideal general book on Aristotle will never come, but it has not come yet.

Visions of the end of the world: Past and present

Abstract: Mass death is constantly before us. The destruction of all of us is a distinct possibility-a possibility that is a constant threat of doomsayers of the left and the right. Threats of total annihilation are not new. The descriptions of the manner, agency, cause, and consequences are. In this paper the symbol of Atomic Age is examined for descriptions of the end. Common eschatological, apocalyptic, and Utopian descriptions of the end are then collected from the religious cultures of the world. These descriptions of the present and the past are used to paint a picture of the present through the use of schemas of basic values. These descriptions and schemas are helpful in examining our own positions in the atomic age and assist us in being sensitive to our students and clients in facing the death of the world as we know it.