Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 1995"

The mangle of practice : time, agency, and science

Abstract: This text offers an understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical and engineering practice, and the production of scientific knowledge. The author presents an approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the number of factors - social, technological, conceptual and natural - that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined practices and human beings are in constantly shifting relationships with one another - "mangled" together in ways that are shaped by the contingencies of culture, time and place. Situating material as well as human agency in their larger cultural context, Pickering uses case studies to show how this picture of the open, changeable nature of science advances a greater understanding of scientific work both past and present. He examines the building of the bubble chamber in particle physics, the search for the quark, the construction of the quarternion system in mathematics and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in industry. He uses these examples to address the most basic elements of scientific practice - the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the development of theory and the interrelation of machines and social organization.

All quiet on the workplace front? a critique of recent trends in british

Abstract: Though perspectives underpinning research may have differed sharply, industrial sociology at its best has been able to uncover die variety of workplace resistance and misbehaviour that lies beneath the surface of the formal and consensual. The paper argues that this legacy is in danger of being lost as labour is taken out of the process and replaced by management as the active and successful agency. While there are a number of practical and theoretical forces shaping this trend, the paper identifies the growing influence of Foucauldian perspectives. It goes on to develop a critique of the way in which such theory and research overstates the extent and effectiveness of new management practices, while marginalising the potential for resistance. Industrial sociology, as well as organisation theory and industrial relations, continues to see the workplace as a focus of change. Organisations are restructured, new management practices revolutionise the employment relationship, new issues such as sexuality appear on the agenda. But it is 'all quiet' in one respect - the virtual removal of labour as an active agency of resistance in a considerable portion of theory and research. The prime purpose of this article is to explore the reasons for, and challenge the consequences of, that trend. On the surface this is a strange development, because the recalcitrant worker has been one of the most persistent motifs of British, and to a lesser extent, American sociology, aided by a long and largely honourable tradition of seeing beneath the surface of formal organisation and the apparent consent of employees in the capitalist employment relationship.

All Quiet on the Workplace Front? A Critique of Recent Trends in British Industrial Sociology

Abstract: Though perspectives underpinning research may have differed sharply, industrial sociology at its best has been able to uncover the variety of workplace resistance and misbehaviour that lies beneath the surface of the formal and consensual. The paper argues that this legacy is in danger of being lost as labour is taken out of the process and replaced by management as the active and successful agency. While there are a number of practical and theoretical forces shaping this trend, the paper identifies the growing influence of Foucauldian perspectives. It goes on to develop a critique of the way in which such theory and research overstates the extent and effectiveness of new management practices, while marginalising the potential for resistance.

Theorising class, health and lifestyles: can Bourdieu help us?

Abstract: What is the relationship between class, health and life-styles, and to what extent does health-related knowledge influence subsequent behaviour? These issues have been a source of considerable debate for medical sociologists and others concerned with promoting ‘healthier’ life-styles over the years. Yet despite a wealth of empirical material, there has been little attempt to theorise this relationship between class, health and lifestyles and the associated issues of structure and agency, accounts and action it raises. This paper attempts to rectify this lacuna through a critical discussion of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and its relevance to the class, health and life-styles debate. In particular, attention is paid to Bourdieu's analysis of the logic of practice, his concepts of habitus and bodily hexis, and the search for social distinction in the construction of (health-related) life-styles. The paper concludes with a critical commentary on these issues and the relative merits of Bourdieu's analysis for the sociology of health and illness. It is argued that despite certain limitations regarding issues of agency and ‘choice’, Bourdieu's analysis does indeed shed important light on the health and lifestyles debate, and that further bridge-building exercises of this nature between mainstream theory and the sociology of health and illness are both necessary and fruitful.

A Theory of Mutual Formation and Moral Hazard with Evidence from the History of the Insurance Industry

Abstract: Nonprofit, mutually owned insurance and banking organizations have significant market shares in the insurance and banking industries. A first step in a systematic study of these financial mutual is to examine the reasons for their formation. Doing so provides empirical support for the view that these mutual arose as an efficient means of addressing contracting challenges caused by aggregate uncertainties and moral hazard. A formal model with this property is presented. We argue that information asymmetries do more to explain the kinds of contracts offered by financial mutual than do agency problems between owners, managers, and customers. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

All things to all people? Perceptions, attributions, and constructions of leadership

Abstract: Recent theory and research has begun to question many of the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning mainstream perspectives on leadership, emphasizing its attributional basis and the socially constructed and contested nature of its meaning. This paper attempts to contribute to this emerging critique by employing an interpretive approach in order to explore the constructions placed upon the phenomenon of leadership by practicing managers and the particular meanings and assumptions that the term conveys. The paper draws upon interviews with managers in the construction industry to develop its main argument: that radical critiques of mainstream leadership theory and research often lose sight of the role of subjective interpretation and agency in the formulation and enactment of the “social myth” of leadership and that an interpretive approach, which explores individuals' own “implicit leadership theories,” can make an important contribution to the further understanding of leadership as a socially constructed phenomenon.

Rational choice and moral agency

Abstract: Preface and AcknowledgmentsPt. IRational Choice1Ch. 1Why Be Rational?6Ch. 2Choosing Strategies28Ch. 3Choosing Ends58Ch. 4Comparing Ends80Ch. 5Reasons for Altruism98Pt. IIMoral Agency121Ch. 6Because It's Right126Ch. 7Social Structure and Moral Constraint155Ch. 8Moral Dualism186Ch. 9Objections and Replies213Pt. IIIReconciliation241Ch. 10Why Be Moral?243References265Index273

Psychopathology and personal agency: Modernity, culture change and eating disorders in South Asian societies

Abstract: The cultural contribution to psychopathology may become more salient in situations of social change, but it remains difficult to distinguish individual agency among wider social and economic transitions, such as 'modernization' or simply 'culture change', which carry the potential for recourse to new patterns. Eating disorders, a biosocial pattern once identified exclusively with European societies, do occur among South Asian women including those living in the West. This seems not just a simple appropriation of contemporary Western ideals of female morphology--the 'fear of fatness'-but a reassertion of an instrumental strategy of self-renunciation in situations of experienced constraint.

The Construction of Moral Agency in the Narratives of High-School Drop-Outs:

Abstract: Through ethnographic, discourse and grammatical analysis, this article discusses the narratives of two high-school drop-outs and describes the various resources these young people use to fashion their identities through the telling of their stories. Through analysis of both clause-level expression of grammatical agency and discursive and cultural contextualization of agentive actions, it is shown that these young people, despite their apparent limited agency in the larger society, express moral agency through their active narration of the events of their lives. It is not only the content of their narratives, but also the way these stories are told that indicate the moral agency of the speakers. A conceptualization of moral agency is developed as it relates not to static universals, but to the shared particulars among this peer group and the common language they use to talk about their experiences.

Exploiting Social Reasoning to Deal with Agency Level Inconsistency.

Abstract: In a previous work [?], we presented the fundamental concepts of a social reasoning mechanism, which enables an agent to reason about the others using information about their goals, actions, resources and plans. In this paper we first place ourselves as an external observer to analyse the possible coupled outcomes of the social reasoning mechanisms of two different agents. We show that in some particular cases, different inferred dependence situations imply that the agents’ mutual representations are inconsistent at an agency level. Then, we detail our analysis in a particular case where the agents have the same plans (and believe in that), showing that some particular coupled outcomes can be explained either by incompleteness or incorrectness of mutual representation. In order to do that, we extend our previous model by introducing the notion of goal situation. Finally, we conclude by showing that these properties may be detected by the agents themselves if we supply them with an internal mechanism which enables them to manipulate the outcomes inferred both by their own social reasoning mechanism and by those of the others, whenever these latter are obtained by communication.

Engagement and Cooperating in Motivated Agent Modelling

Abstract: The title of this paper suggests two distinct aspects of the models that we propose and consider. The first of these is the modelling of other agents by motivated agents. That is to say that the act of modelling is itself motivated and constrained by the agent doing that modelling. The second aspect is that all such models will also be of motivated agents. It is not sufficient merely to know what other agents are like, but also to know why they are like that. This why aspect is what provides the extra information that allows a greater understanding of the interactions between entities in the world, and consequently provides for more resilient agents capable of effectively dealing with new and unforeseen circumstances in an uncertain world. Previous work has described a formal framework for agency and autonomy in which agents are viewed as objects with goals, and autonomous agents are agents with motivations. This paper considers the nature of cooperation within that framework. We identify distinct kinds of interaction, depending on the nature of the entities involved. In particular, we describe and specify the differences that arise in these interactions which we characterise as engagements of non-autonomous agents, and cooperation between autonomous agents.

A Trojan Horse at the Tate: Theorizing the Museum as Agency and Structure

Abstract: It is argued that sociology lacks an adequate conceptualization of the museum/society relationship. It is further argued (1) that the museum is an agency of classification; (2) that it is a relationship of cultural interdependence and (3) that museums have an internal relationship to modernization. The institution of the museum is shown to arise out of the indeterminacies of modernization. A dispute in the early history of London's Tate Gallery is explored as it illuminates that institution's organization of the contradictions of modernization. Pace Bourdieu and Elias, a key contradiction is seen to arise from a differentiation of the field of power and the cultural field. It is argued, against essentialist accounts of museums, that the Tate produced its point of view through the medium of this contradiction.

Toward a pleasure‐centered economy: Wondering a feminist aesthetics of performance

Abstract: The visceral, somatic, and material pleasures of performance have been masked in text‐centered approaches to performance that divest the performer of materiality and agency while investing the text with corporeality and power. A feminist aesthetics would place pleasure at the center of performance theory to imagine alternate discourses of performance practice, to interrogate sexuality in and of performance as constitutive of its power, and to mark the tensive boundaries of identity politics negotiated in performance. In this libidinal economy of pleasure, French feminisms' “wonder” and jouissance are strategies for claiming the materiality, agency, and ethics of the performer. This economy of pleasure is inseparable from a pedagogy of pleasure that intervenes in the politics of vision and the culturally bounded ways of looking at performance.

Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman

Abstract: Early contractarians such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stretched the idea of contract to encompass all realms of society: the political, the economic, the familial. Contract is still a fundamental concept for many modern disciplines; indeed, it names fields in political philosophy, in economics, and in law. There was no such governing notion of contract in the fourteenth century, no metaphor of exchange that could link together ideas about agency, conditions, profit, and responsibility from different disciplines and provide a theory of the basis of society itself. Retrospectively it may seem that scattered ideas about contract were, in fact, being developed: for instance, by the common law in the actions called debt, covenant, and trespass; by constitutional theory, in conciliarism; by economic thought, in a miscellany of glosses and laws redressing fraud and regulating prices and markets; by theology, in discussions of will, intention, and the marriage sacrament; by the civil law, in Roman law of contract; and by canon law, in treatments of individual consent and incapacity in marriage. Yet nothing about this discontinuous hodgepodge predicts that a fundamental connection among those topics will emerge in later political theory. To find a powerful combination of social analysis and political philosophy that takes up the issues deliberated by the later contractarians, we can call upon a medieval allegorist. In a brilliant intellectual synthesis, the fourteenth-century English text we call Piers Plowman draws ideas about agency from three separate arenas in order to inaugurate a proleptic general consideration of contract: the three ideas are unity of person (from marriage law), just price (from economic thought), and constitutional monarchy (from political philosophy). Centuries before modern contract theory, Piers Plowman manages to think across disciplinary boundaries, to see agency in its various philosophical, legal, sexual, economic, and political contexts, and to invite its audience to compare the different accounts of agency

Agency and transcendence: The experience of therapeutic change

Abstract: Psychotherapeutic change lies at the heart of effective therapy yet little is known about it. In this study, twenty major or significant experiences of change were studied which occurred both in and out of therapy. A phenomenological research design was utilized in an attempt to identify the essential structure of these experiences. Findings indicated several initiating modes that led to the changes, each of which culminated in the act of transcendence or moving beyond contextual limitations. Transcendence is explored in terms of its component aspects of the overarching insight and an array of subtle yet powerful psychological acts. Suggestions are made for psychotherapy in terms of the enhancement of agency, empowerment, and liberation.

Postmodernism As A Humanism

Abstract: The impact of postmodern thought on traditional humanistic psychology is examined, and the conclusion is reached that the effect of the postmodern argument is to undermine the grounding principles for a moral, humane and generative society. However, by revisinoing such concepts as agency and experience in terms of the primacy of relationship, postmodernism urges us to create multiple ways of generating integrative conversation, in a way that is congenial with the deepest hopes of the humanistic tradition.

Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory

Abstract: "Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory" is a unique collection of essays dealing with the intersections between science and mathematics and the radical reconceptions of knowledge, language, proof, truth, and reality currently emerging from poststructuralist literary theory, constructivist history and sociology of science, and related work in contemporary philosophy. Featuring a distinguished group of international contributors, this volume engages themes and issues central to current theoretical debates in virtually all disciplines: agency, causality, determinacy, representation, and the social dynamics of knowledge. In a substantive introductory essay, the editors explain the notion of 'postclassical theory' and discuss the significance of ideas such as emergence and undecidability in current work in and on science and mathematics.Other essays include a witty examination of the relations among mathematical thinking, writing, and the technologies of virtual reality; an essay that reconstructs the conceptual practices that led to a crucial mathematical discovery - or construction - in the 19th century; a discussion of the implications of Bohr's complementarity principle for classical ideas of reality; an examination of scientific laboratories as 'hybrid' communities of humans and non-humans; an analysis of metaphors of control, purpose, and necessity in contemporary biology; an exploration of truth and lies, and the play of words and numbers in Shakespeare, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Beckett; and a final chapter on recent engagements, or non-engagements, between rationalist/realist philosophy of science and contemporary science studies. This book is a revised and expanded version of a previously published issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. It will be of interest to readers involved in the fields of literary and cultural theory, and the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Contributors include: Malcolm Ashmore, Michel Callon, Owen Flanagan, John Law, Susan Oyama, Andrew Pickering, Arkady Plotnitsky, Brian Rotman, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, John Vignaux Smyth, and E. Roy Weintraub.

Agency, structure, and jewish survival of the holocaust:

Abstract: In this article I use a life history of two brothers who survived the Holocaust to bring survivor research into the mainstream of sociological inquiry and to explore one of the central problems of general social theory: the relationship between human agency and social structure. A theory of agency and structure offers a distinctly sociological alternative in a literature that has been dominated by psychological theorizing and that has often characterized Jews in overly negative or overly heroic terms. Survivors' accounts are permeated with “epiphanies,” including “crucial moments” involving the ability to make difficult choices and quick decisions that were the difference between life and death. These situations illuminate the relationship between agency and structure in instances where the tension between them is heightened. Survivors' life histories suggest ways in which Jews' ability to exercise agency to survive structural conditions of extremity was influenced by their pre-war exposure to cultural schemas and resources that they were able to transpose to the war-occupation context. Successful agency, however, was in large part a collective accomplishment and dependent on factors beyond individuals' control.

A `Show' of Agency is Enough:

Abstract: Descartes and Cartesians such as Harwood Fisher (1995) claim that human agency is only known to us as such intellectually, through supposed linguistically indifferent concepts or ideas of agency ce...

Post-modernism and the notion of rationality in economics

Abstract: This article assesses contributions from economists who see the postmodernist framework as providing a viable alternative to the behavioristic model of action in economics. It is found that, although postmodernism identifies many of the problems of mainstream economics, it too remains unable to sustain the notions of choice and agency that it preaches because it fails to escape the anthropocentrism of positivist philosophy. Once this anthropocentrism is abandoned, it can be seen that agency lies not only in linguistic redescription but also in the understanding of real causal mechanisms that exist and act independently of any individual human agents. (c) 1995 Academic Press, Inc. Copyright 1995 by Oxford University Press.

Landowners' perceptions related to wetland regulatory policy in coastal louisiana

Abstract: Coastal wetlands in Louisiana are over 75% privately owned. Activities conducted in wetlands are primarily regulated through both the Clean Water Act (Section 404) and the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA). The purpose of this study was to investigate coastal landowners' perceptions related to wetland regulatory policy and use the results in the development of future, more workable wetland regulatory policy in Louisiana and the United States (see recommendations section). Regulatory program concerns most often listed by private landowners include: 1) acceptable definition of a wetland remains unsettled; 2) inconsistencies caused when two or more government agencies or programs issue conflicting wetland determinations on the same tract of land; 3) delays in obtaining a wetland determination; 4) delays in obtaining a wetland permit decision; 5) cost of permit and/or permit requirements too high; 6) loss of private property rights due to protection of public wetland benefits; and 7) the issue of regulatory "takings" without just compensation (under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution).

Radical Geography as Mere Political Economy: the Local Politics of Space

Abstract: David Byrne argues that both the structuralist ‘new geography’ and the poststructuralist ‘new new’ geography ignore or deny the role of class as a creative agency in the formation of urban life. New perspectives on class, which reduces it to an essentially cultural position, reinforce this tendency to allocate all creative capacity under capitalism to capital and capitalists. The consequent pessimism has informed the collaborative politics characteristic of ‘the new urban left’ in the UK. The article concludes with an argument for active strategies of ‘empowerment’ directed towards the working poor as a component of the ‘social proletariat’.

Ideal Speech Conditions, Modern Discourse and Education

Abstract: Habermas's educational importance is usually misconstrued or underestimated, partly because the scope and implications of ideal speech conditions are generally misunderstood. These conditions are only relevant to discursive speech situations, but non-manipulative teaching need not be discursive. And not even discursive teaching is an appropriate occasion for ideal speech conditions. They properly apply to discourse institutions, at the ‘epistemic centre of modernity’. Thus, the concept of ideal speech conditions impinges on the relation of school to higher education and on curricular change as an agency of modernisation, and illuminates the need for access to discourse institutions, if personal autonomy is an aim for school children, students or adults. Neo-Marxists, traditionalists and progressives all misunderstand the importance of discourse institutions.

Education and Moral Development: the role of reason and circumstance

Abstract: This paper claims that liberal moral education is predicated on an inadequate conception of the roots of moral disposition and agency. It advances a view of modernity in which social and material conditions, whilst not comprising an ‘iron cage’, nevertheless give momentum to some trends in social (and individual) development, and place others at a discount. Thus a moral education which seeks to assure an open future through individual cognitive emancipation risks exacerbating processes inimical to its aims. This is illustrated with reference to the socio-economic conditions of contemporary liberal capitalism and to broader features of modernity. Implications are sketched for the emancipatory aims of education, the role of the school in moral development, the scope of education theory, and the development of critical social theory and social practices.

Marxist state theory and state autonomy theory: the case of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education

Abstract: In recent times, there have been a number of critiques of Marxist and neo‐Marxist analyses of the state and education policy. These have drawn on postmodernist, ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ and state autonomy perspectives. While the postmodernist and ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ approaches have attracted critical response, to date, the state autonomy perspective has, to our knowledge, gone unchallenged. To address this theoretical lacuna, this paper analyses one writer's attempt, via an historical case study, to uphold state autonomy theory by detailing the ongoing relationship between one quasi‐state agency and the practice of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education. We argue that there are serious conceptual weaknesses in this latest attempt to apply state autonomy theory to educational policy analysis. The arguments in the case study under consideration are seriously compromised by a basically flawed hypothesis, a misrepresentation of contemporary (neo‐) Marxist education policy analysis and by a fail...