Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 1986"

agency and social theory: a review of Anthony Giddens

Abstract: New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 1. Power, Property and the State

Chapter 23 Agency and the market

Abstract: Publisher Summary A very widespread economic situation is that of the relation between a principal and an agent. Even in ordinary and in legal discourse, the principal–agent relation is significant in scope and economic magnitude. The chapter discusses that the common element is the presence of two individuals. One is to choose an action among a number of alternative possibilities. The action affects the welfare of the other, the principal, as well as that of the agent's self. The principal, at least in the simplest cases, has the additional function of prescribing payoff rules—that is, of determining in advance of the choice of action, a rule that obliges him or her as to what fee to pay as a function of his or her observations on the results of the action. The problem acquires interest only when there is uncertainty at some point, and, in particular, when the information available to the two participants is unequal. In technical language, the outcome is a random variable whose distribution depends on the action taken. The principal–agent theory is in the standard economic tradition. Both principal and agent are assumed to be making their decisions optimally in view of their constraints. Intended transactions are realized. The function of this theory has the dual aspect usual in economic theory; it can be interpreted both normatively and descriptively. It can also be interpreted as an attempt to explain observed phenomena in the empirical economic world, particularly exchange relations that are observed but not explained by more standard economic theory.

Choice and constraint in ethnic minority housing: A structurationist view

Abstract: The paper argues that the theory of structuration can help to resolve some problems in explaining ethnic housing and segregation. First, it reviews some of the existing literature on ethnic housing, arguing that the polarisation between ‘choice’ and ‘constraint’ interpretations needs to be replaced by a more integrated view. Then it argues that the theory of structuration provides a promising way of pursuing such integration, though it is necessary to develop appropriate methodologies if research is to put structurationist views into practice. These methods will probably draw on realism. Finally, the paper presents a brief sketch of the findings of a research project into ethnic housing in Bedford, arguing that it can be explained only by a wide variety of factors, involving major structures as well as significant agency, and shows that choice and constraint have adjusted together and changed over time.

Central planning and the 'second economy' in soviet-type systems*

Abstract: Our profession has developed two polar idealisations of the economic system of socialism, in the sense of collective ownership of the 'means of production'. One is that of hierarchical planning, with information flowing up from factories and farms to a central planning agency, where it is fed into computers, processed for consistency and perhaps even optimality relative to some objective function of the policy-makers and then becomes the basis for directives that are binding on all managers and ultimately on all workers in the system. An authoritative exposition of the pure theory of this approach to socialist economies is the work of L. V. Kantorovich (I965), which can be looked upon as a 'rational' version of the 'command economy' depicted in Grossman (I963). At the other extreme is the vision of decentralised market socialism, associated with the names of Lange (I936) and Lerner (I934), in which the role of the central planning agency is merely that of a Walrasian auctioneer, guiding the economy to a Pareto-efficient equilibrium with consumer sovereignty. Sophisticated hybrids of the two polar cases, such as 'two-level planning', have been developed by Kornai (I967), Malinvaud (I967) and others. Reality in the Soviet Union and the East European satellites deviates considerably from either of these theoretical constructs. The actual operational mechanisms and outcomes of the Soviet system have been intensively studied by Western economists for the last forty years following the pioneering work of Alexander Gerschenkron and Abram Bergson. Various experiments in Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia have been identified with 'market socialism', though none appear ever to have approached close to the pure Lange-Lerner scheme. A phenomenon that is drawing increasing attention from scholars of Soviettype economies is what has come to be known as the 'Second Economy' or 'Parallel Market'. In the major article on the subject, Grossman (I977) defines the 'Second Economy' as all production or trade for private gain, whether legal or illegal.' He gives afascinating account of the phenomenon, with many examples from agriculture, industry, transport, construction and retail distribution, concluding that its quantitative significance for the Soviet system is large and growing. His account depicts the allocation of resources in these economies as being the outcome of an interaction between official planning and the 'invisible * This article is based upon work supported by the US National Sciences Foundation under Grant SES-8i-i6380. We gratefully acknowledge the hospitality of the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm, where Findlay completed his work in this paper, and the helpful comments of two anonymous referees. 1 Both the terms 'Second Economy' and 'Parallel Market' were coined by K. S. Karol in 197I, according to Grossman. Further detailed information and commentary is contained in Katsenelinboigen

'.In the Name of All My Coloured Brethren and Sisters.' A Biography of Bessy Cameron

Abstract: Since the early 1970s, historians and other scholars have made a concerted effort towards understanding 19th and 20th century Aboriginal history. Initially most of this research was undertaken by white historians, who emphasised the destructive impact of the European invasion of the Australian continent, and Aboriginal resistance to colonisation. This was a necessary corrective to the earlier historiography, which represented the colonial frontier as peaceful, and neglected the European role in the dispossession and decimation of Aborigines. However, these studies had several weaknesses: they tended to be androcentric and eurocentric; Blacks remained anonymous or were stereotyped, the women being portrayed as passive victims and the men as heroic resistance fighters; no account was taken of co-operation and collaboration.(1)This reinterpretation of Aboriginal-European relations did not always accord with understandings Aborigines had of their history since 1788.(2) More recent work, however, has provided Aboriginal perspectives, and analyses absent from much of the earlier historical work. In examining the process of accommodation, some of this writing has revealed a measure of Aboriginal agency (within, of course, the constraints of colonialism).(3) These insights have arisen most clearly in biographical writings, a field of growing interest. At first most of the studies were devoted to Aboriginal men,(4) but recently this imbalance has been redressed with a number of books concerning Aboriginal women, including a useful collection of biographical essays published last year.(5)This article is a life-history of an Aboriginal woman named Bessy Flower, who lived from about 1851 to 1895. In seeking to reconstruct Bessy's(6) life, I am attempting, firstly, to recover a sense of her life as she might have experienced it and, secondly, to interpret it from an outsider's perspective. Developing the theoretical insights of the historian E. P. Thompson, I am seeking to understand Bessy's life as one which was determined not only by specific social and material forces, but also by her own choices and selfdirected actions. This is not to stress unduly Bessy's individual autonomy, nor to argue that she made herself as much as she was made; it is rather to contend that, within the limits of particular structures conditioned by class, racial, and patriarchal ideologies, she contributed by conscious and active efforts to the course her life took.(7)In this account, as in any biography, the relationship between the individual life and the socio-cultural milieu must be explored, not only to uncover the details of Bessy's personality and life but also to establish these firmly in the context of the environment in which she grew up, and of which she was a part. As one exponent of the life-history method has put it:...it becomes as important to know the decisions and actions of...[a subject] through their life as it is to know the system of social relations of society in which they live and which to various degrees provides the parameters in which actions are taken and decisions made.(8)In writing the biography of an Aboriginal woman who lived in the 19th century, the problem of source material is most pressing. Almost all the biographical studies to appear so far have concerned Aboriginal people alive today, or who have died only in the last two or three decades. The biographers and their Aboriginal subjects have known one another, and sometimes the life histories have been collaborative works or at least a result of close friendships.(9) Only a few studies of Aboriginal men and women who lived in the 19th century have appeared, and this is undoubtedly due to an assumed lack of documentary evidence and the unavailability of oral testimony. However, recent essays by Diane Barwick and others indicate it is possible, and some scholars are now compiling life histories -- collective biography -- to understand the Aboriginal past. …

Domination, Self-Justification, and Self-Doubt: Some Social-Psychological Considerations

Abstract: This article employs social psychology to illuminate processes of domination, self-justification, and self-doubt among dominant groups. It claims that social identity theory as formulated by Tajfel and his associates helps explain group domination. It argues that attribution research, the just world phenomenon, the "base line fallacy," and schema theory, inter alia, help understand dominant group self-justification. But dominant group self-justification is never complete; instead, it is accompanied by pervasive, social-psychologically engendered self-doubt. A principle contributor to dominant group self-doubt is the emergence of a social control agency that enjoys partial autonomy. In sum, the piece is meant to integrate research in social-psychology into traditional Marxist and Weberian approaches to domination and political conflict.

Questions and Some Answers

Abstract: The view of intention and agency sketched in these chapters seems coherent in itself. It also seems to me to accord with the variety of data we have considered. While it is not as unified and systematic as some simpler theories, it attains a comprehensiveness which simpler views lack since simpler theories are often based on a narrower range of cases of action, for instance, on actions undertaken in fully intentionally pursuing conscious plans of action. As well, the present theory of agency is anchored in an activist, naturalist view. I have argued that the dualistic conception of the agent as an all powerful source of volitions is too fantastic to be taken seriously. Ethological ways of thinking should replace the Cartesian model of action. Evolutionary thinking should, together with human developmental studies, make a suitable view of action and agency sensitive to the continuity within all animal activity, from the reactive but controlled to the planned and calculated.

Labour mobility and economic transformation in Solomon Islands: lusim Choiseul, bae kam baek moa?

Abstract: This thesis examines the relationship of labour mobility and socioeconomic transformation in the Solomon Islands, and proposes that one cannot be understood in isolation from the other. Explanation is pursued both at the levels of structure and of agency, and integration of these levels is attempted in some places. This is discussed in the first part of the thesis, within a general discussion of issues of theory and method. The second part of the thesis deals with the structural parameters of labour mobility. Through the twentieth century, the institutions of government, mission and capitalist enterprise have been central in shaping the Solomon Islands social formation. The roles of these formal institutions with implications for labour mobility have ranged from purveyors of ideology to employers of labour. Another major element in the social formation is an original Melanesian mode of production which influences labour mobility through village-level institutions such as the land tenure system, kinship, and household operation. Labour circulation is a major factor in linking village and non-village institutions, and more abstractly in articulating two different modes of production. The third part of the thesis considers the ways in which individual agency operates within structure. The data base are life histories and related information from the Mbambatana language group on the island of Choiseul. This is integrated with national, regional and village-level structural information. Education is important in the way it 'selects' individuals for certain kinds of employment. This selection process occurs within the wage economy generally, but is further refined within institutions of employment. This results in labour mobility 'streams' which have identifiable characteristics related to gender, education, and employment type. Movements within each 'stream' have typical temporal and spatial characteristics. Patterns of labour mobility, especially sequence, are affected by gender and life cycle factors. For men and women the most critical changes take place in the 20s age span, but individual behaviour varies according to marriage and childrearing patterns. From a village perspective, labour circulation is a logical response to the necessity of operating within two different economic systems typified by different modes of production. This process of articulation is manifest in other ways as well, and households or families may adopt different strategies in operating within two different systems. The particular strategy adopted depends on the labour power available, degree of access to land, and employment possibilities of individual members.

Invited Introduction: Finding Psychology

Abstract: The philosophy of mind is largely a chase after fugitive facts; facts about meaning, thought, agency, consciousness, whose nature escapes our understanding. They escape it for two reasons. Firstly, what we would allow as success in understanding them is constrained by various principles, and the constraints are very tight. Misinterpreted even a little, they become impossible to satisfy. They include:

Martin Luther: Knowledge and Mediation in the Renaissance

Abstract: S. P. Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640-1770, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 279, hb. £40, ISBN: 0521810051This book is driven by a forceful and thought-provoking general argument which is sometimes permitted to corral the case-studies that support it. Hypotheses non fingo, said Newton. That cannot be said by the author of this book. Hypothesis fingat. That argument is as follows. Present-day cultural critics and commentators are intensely sceptical about the possibility of 'disinterested' points of view, however certain kinds of statement might masquerade as 'detached', 'rational', ideologically neutral. All judgements, such commentators consider, are self-interested and subjective, shaped by the will-to-power of their proponents. There is no such thing as an 'objective' opinion. Professor Gordon's book examines the aetiology and archaeology of what he fears has now become an unexamined foundational assumption of most thought. When did we start believing this, and was there ever a time when we might have believed something else?His angle is that the Hobbesian-Mandevillian axis asserting that all discourse and all behaviour is self-interested - that there can be no such phenomenon as altruism - was opposed throughout its active life by an alternative, dubbed by Professor Gordon 'the passivity trope'. This 'constructs a self whose disinterestedness is guaranteed by forces outside conscious control. This does not mean unconscious forces in the psychoanalytic sense; it means, rather, external forces that work through the body and by-pass the mind' (p. 5). During the Civil War, Cromwell and his apologists frequently spoke of God's agency in man. Men were passive receptors for the work of grace in them, and the opinions that propelled their actions were thought of as in an important sense not their own, not initiated by them. Gordon's chapter on this strand of Puritan thought is alive both to the very many inflections and nuances of it, and to its critics who tried to expose it as a hypocritical masquerade. In his chapter on Hobbes, Gordon argues that to assert the claim that all action is self-interested, Hobbes had to defeat what the author terms 'romance-heroic discourse', in which, it seems, claims to disinterested action are frequently made. There is an opposite discourse, the 'herculean', in which the pattern of action is self-interested and Hobbesian. Here Professor Gordon's detailed argument is so much in the grip of his overall hypothesis that it fails entirely to convince. What exactly is romance-heroic discourse? Which texts are an expression of it? Where exactly in Hobbes's writing does he have anything specific to say about those works? Same questions about 'herculean' discourse, to which the chapter does not give us satisfactory answers. The conduct of the argument, at all times lively and absorbing, is nevertheless at some distance from works of imaginative literature and is unconvincingly reified.Chapter three on The Spectator faces similar difficulties of the shape of the argument coercing the texture of the argument. Addison and Steele's periodical is an important transitional stage in Professor Gordon's case, because although through the discourse of 'the polite' it presents the possibility that subjects might be entirely 'legible', entirely transparent - concealing nothing, hiding nothing, and therefore nonrhetorical, undeceptive, potentially disinterested - Gordon insists that this way of regarding people is controlled by a Mr Spectator figure who deploys the Hobbesian threat of constant surveillance to discipline such subjects. …

A Directable Ashby System

Abstract: A directable Ashby system is a system that may operate at several different hierarchical levels. Each level has a collection of laws or rules that are not reducible to other levels. In human systems, the distinct levels require views of humans that are dramatically different from each other. At some levels traditional scientific concepts and methods are applicable. A person may be said to have been caused to act in a certain way. At other levels, human choice and creativity must be accounted for by using neo-scientific concepts such as rule construction and rule governed activity. People may shift from one hierarchical level to another in so far as the essential variables, such as agency, have certain values. The scientific accounts at the two levels will be fundamentally different. A directable Ashby system is a system in which the values of the essential variables change as a result of the manipulation of control variables such as repression and lifeworld constructs.

Continuity and change at C.B.C. : an ethnography of a Catholic Brothers School in Australian society

Abstract: This thesis is an ethnographic investigation of a Catholic Brothers school, Christian Brothers College (C.B.C.), in the provincial city of Newburyport, Australia* The study explores the traditions and historical purposes of education at the independent, religious school, and examines the manner in which these have changed or are changing. All names, including the name of the school and the city, have been altered to preserve anonymity. The opening section discusses the emergence of the theoretical problem of the dialectic of change and continuity in the ongoing activity of C.B.C. actors. This is followed by an argument that an understanding of such activity requires an ethnographic perspective. Such a perspective, however, must not overlook the organisational and structural constraints within which participants operate. Hence, a critical ethnography, which takes account of both the agency of human actors and the structures which influence their activity, is advocated as the most suitable approach for understanding continuity and change within a complex organisation in its social context. This argument is followed by an ethnographic account of Christian Brothers College, which focuses on the perceptions and activities of teachers and administrators, Individual chapters deal with the Christian Brothers Order and its educational mission at C.B.C.; the nature of religious education at the school; the administration of the school; approaches to control and discipline; the curriculum and evaluation of pupils; and the relationship between C.B.C. and the wider Newburyport community. The concluding section integrates an analysis of continuity and change at C.B.C. with a discussion of theoretical perspectives on reproduction and transformation. The thesis concludes that, although change has occurred in many ways, an institutionalised image of C.B.C. as 'Brothers’ school'persists and impedes the formation of more democratic authority relations, curriculum, and evaluation. The potential for such change, however, is seen most strongly in the ongoing reform of religious education.

The Forensic Evaluation and Treatment

Abstract: This article will review the history of ethics and values in the forensic evaluations and treatment of children. Topics to be discussed include paternalism, advocacy, parental responsibility, and legal doctrine of parens patriae. Various aspects of the treatment of children, including medications, behavior modification, and psychotherapy, are also examined for ethical considerations. Agency consultation in conflicts of ethics that are associated with public laws are also addressed. The ethical implications of the use of children in any research as research subjects is also addressed. One must consider the distinction between ethics and values. It is this distinction that challenges the forensic clinician who is asked to be a responsible advocate, a clinician, teacher or parent, or even institution. The word ethics includes concepts of principle and honor, both moral and proper. The word values includes the concepts of standards, beliefs, criteria, goals and models. Most clinicians who have worked primarily with adults or who have not been experienced in assessing ethical questions concerning children and adults often function in the "what is best" school of guiding ethical Most frequently, individuals working with children adhere to the concept of paternalism. Early views were that the guiding principle of liberty would prohibit interference with freedom of action by an individual. This idea is soon followed by interference being permissible if it protects the naive or young from

Recognizing Men: A Feminist Vision

Abstract: elude our conceptual grasp, for the most part. The pornography debate gains significance from the fact that it has been a political vehicle for women-on both sides of the issue-to begin to assert and articulate fundamental changes in male and female forms of sexual agency. In this article, I will analyze the underpinnings of the pornography debate, and then attempt to move beyond it to identify terms more adequate to the renegotiation of the sexual dynamic between men and women. The first thing to notice about the pornography controversy is the political form it has taken. Each side in this debate, both Anti-Pornography feminists and the opposing Anti-Censorship feminists (hereafter AP feminists and AC feminists), has been able to drape itself in the resonant, flowing texts of 19th-century liberalism. In fact, one can even trace the political leitmotif of each side back to a single political source, John Stuart Mill's now classical statement of democratic political agency in On Liberty. The AP feminists rally behind the claim that pornography harms women. Whether focussing on a notion that it encourages and increases actual violence against women, or more broadly condemning pornography as a sort of environmental pollution harmful to men as well as women in its degrading attitude to human bodies, AP feminists identify pornography as a public harm.' It was J.S. Mill who first proposed a Harms Principle as the justification for government curtailment of individual activities, and discussion today over whether or not a government may intervene to abridge a particular individual freedom is still formulated primarily in Millian terms of whether or not a harm has actually been committed, and whether the act of government intervention will be capable of eradicating this harm without creating greater harms as a result of the intervention.2 The AP movement thus enables feminists to enter the mainstream legal and political structure as morally indignant citizens, expressing legitimate anger at the harmful activities of the pornography industry, pressing for legal measures to deal with this social problem. The frequent alliance between AP feminists and members of religious or conservative groups serves, in a sense, to emphasize the objective nature of the social harm at stake, when citizens with such disparate political agenda band together to oppose it.

History, Narrative, and Innocence Unprotected

Abstract: The appeal of the structuralist movement of the 1960s derived from its bold claim that all aspects of culture could be understood as structures, or as products of structural operations, that were linguistic in nature. Cultural critics were encouraged to demystify the apparent chaos of social reality by using semiotic analysis to identify the limited set of generative "deep structures" constant within the inexhaustible varieties of cultural activity and experience. One result of such an undertaking was the specification of significant similarities between the writing of literature and the writing of history. Historians have traditionally claimed both that their work constitutes a unifying of science and art and that their practice is distinct from those of science and art. Structuralism refigured this apparent confusion by pointing to the undeniable deep structure of narrative which likened historiographic productions to literature. Furthermore, the claim of affinity between history and science was seriously challenged as subsequent studies of narrative described the realist text (whether in literature or in history) as a suspect representational endeavor. It was demonstrated that the defining properties of narrative render it formally, and thus necessarily, inadequate to the task of representing the totality of material social reality. In simplest form, a narrative foregrounds the individual agency of a set of characters and also structures a cause and effect sequence of actions leading to a designated endpoint (closure). Such a textual form, applied to a historical

Activity and Development

Abstract: In this chapter I will survey just a sample of the work in developmental studies and ethological inquiries which give the activist view further empirical plausibility and a naturalistic setting. I cannot prove that it is the most (much less only) plausible conception of agency. I do not suppose such a claim can be proven. Still, given what we suppose we know about the structure and development of animals, including humans, this conception of agency seems plausible on every front. Of course, I also claim that the activist perspective has the empirical bases afforded by our usual understanding of agents and their deeds. In addition, it is set in the context of developmental and comparative ontogeny of behaviors. While our knowledge and theorizing are limited in these areas, the activist conception of action, the conceptions of power and ability, and the notion of psychological causation are designed to be understood in what seems the most plausible theories of behavioral development. In such theories, native proclivities, developmental stages of both continuous and noncontinuous sorts, periods of critical learning and developmental capacities, plasticity of behavior routines within the context of genetic makeup, and the crucial role of ‘contingent’ stimuli in development are all among the bits and pieces which supplement and support the present view of agency. Apart from the activist view, a host of data appears ano-molous.