Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 2000"

Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.

Abstract: Human beings can be proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function. Accordingly, research guided by self-determination theo~ has focused on the social-contextual conditions that facilitate versus forestall the natural processes of self-motivation and healthy psychological development. Specifically, factors have been examined that enhance versus undermine intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, and well-being. The findings have led to the postulate of three innate psychological needs--competence, autonomy, and relatednesswhich when satisfied yield enhanced self-motivation and mental health and when thwarted lead to diminished motivation and well-being. Also considered is the significance of these psychological needs and processes within domains such as health care, education, work, sport, religion, and psychotherapy. T he fullest representations of humanity show people to be curious, vital, and self-motivated. At their best, they are agentic and inspired, striving to learn; extend themselves; master new skills; and apply their talents responsibly. That most people show considerable effort, agency, and commitment in their lives appears, in fact, to be more normative than exceptional, suggesting some very positive and persistent features of human nature. Yet, it is also clear that the human spirit can be diminished or crushed and that individuals sometimes reject growth and responsibility. Regardless of social strata or cultural origin, examples of both children and adults who are apathetic, alienated, and irresponsible are abundant. Such non-optimal human functioning can be observed not only in our psychological clinics but also among the millions who, for hours a day, sit passively before their televisions, stare blankly from the back of their classrooms, or wait listlessly for the weekend as they go about their jobs. The persistent, proactive, and positive tendencies of human nature are clearly not invariantly apparent. The fact that human nature, phenotypically expressed, can be either active or passive, constructive or indolent, suggests more than mere dispositional differences and is a function of more than just biological endowments. It also bespeaks a wide range of reactions to social environments that is worthy of our most intense scientific investigation. Specifically, social contexts catalyze both within- and between-person differences in motivation and personal growth, resulting in people being more self-motivated, energized, and integrated in some situations, domains, and cultures than in others. Research on the conditions that foster versus undermine positive human potentials has both theoretical import and practical significance because it can contribute not only to formal knowledge of the causes of human behavior but also to the design of social environments that optimize people's development, performance, and well-being. Research guided by self-determination theory (SDT) has had an ongoing concern with precisely these

Being Human: The Problem of Agency

Abstract: Humanity and the very notion of the human subject are under threat from postmodernist thinking which has declared not only the 'Death of God' but also the 'Death of Man'. This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and personal identity - all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity. This original and provocative new book from leading social theorist Margaret S. Archer builds on the themes explored in her previous books Culture and Agency (CUP 1988) and Realist Social Theory (CUP 1995). It will be required reading for academics and students of social theory, cultural theory, political theory, philosophy and theology.

The Moral Basis of Stakeholder Theory

Abstract: Stakeholder theory is an important and commonly used framework for business ethics Several of the most popular business ethics and business and society texts such as Archie Carroll's Business and Society: Ethics and Stakeholder Management (1993) and Joseph Weiss's Business Ethics: A Managerial, Stakeholder Approach (1994) rely on the concept In the past two years, over two hundred articles on stakeholder theory have appeared in philosophical and business journals1 In this paper I will examine the claim that businesses should consider the interests of stake holders, and question whether there is a moral basis for that claim I will point out three approaches to stakeholder theory: prudence, agency, and deontological views Of these, deontology has offered the strongest arguments for a normative stakeholder approach However, on examination it turns out that deontology in this context relies on an embedded notion of corporate personhood When this is made explicit, it both underwrites duties to some, but not all, stakeholders, and provides a way to distinguish between competing stakeholder claims

Persons and causes : the metaphysics of free will

Abstract: Introduction 1. Freedom and Determinism 2. Freedom and Indeterminism: Some Unsatisfactory Proposals 3. The Agent as Cause: Reid, Taylor, and Chisholm 4. The Metaphysics of Free Will 5. Reasons and Causes 6. Agency, Mind, and Reductionism Bibliography Index

Agency, Democracy, and Nature: The U.S. Environmental Movement from a Critical Theory Perspective

Abstract: In this book Robert Brulle draws on a broad range of empirical and theoretical research to investigate the effectiveness of U.S. environmental groups. Brulle shows how Critical Theory--in particular the work of Jrgen Habermas--can expand our understanding of the social causes of environmental degradation and the political actions necessary to deal with it. He then develops both a pragmatic and a moral argument for broad-based democratization of society as a prerequisite to the achievement of ecological sustainability.From the perspectives of frame analysis, resource mobilization, and historical sociology, using data on more than one hundred environmental groups, Brulle examines the core beliefs, structures, funding, and political practices of a wide variety of environmental organizations. He identifies the social processes that foster the development of a democratic environmental movement and those that hinder it. He concludes with suggestions for how environmental groups can make their organizational practices more democratic and politically effective.

Reflections on Social Movement Theory: Criticisms and Proposals

Abstract: The arrival of a new century and a new millennium are attention-grabbing symbolic markers. They provide a convenient opportunity for me to reflect critically on the current status of social movement theory. Because of space limitations, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive review and critique of this burgeoning field. I focus here on what I contend are serious blind spots within current social movement theory. I argue that these theories continue to slight the role that human agency plays in social movements. The slight occurs because assumptions in current theory lead its proponents to gloss over fundamental sources of agency that social movement groups can bring to the mobilization process, cultural framing, tactical problems, movement leadership, protest histories, and transformative events. I address the human agency and these movement phenomena, and offer correctives. By the mid-twentieth century, collective behavior and related theories constituted the dominant paradigm that guided research of social movements. These theories argued that social movements were a form of collective behavior that emerged when significant social and cultural breakdowns occurred. As a form of collective behavior, social movements were considered spontaneous, unorganized, and unstructured phenomena that were discontinuous with institutional and organizational behavior

How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education

Abstract: How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, by David Labaree. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 328 PP. $35.00 David Labaree adds to a very large body of literature that criticizes American schooling. In How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning he describes the relationship and contradictions between social mobility (private good), social efficiency, and democratic equality (public good). His thesis is that the pursuit of credentials (grades, degrees, etc.), as private good, has come to dominate and actually hinder students from acquiring knowledge and learning skills that would make them better citizens and better contributers to the capitalist economy. Labaree follows the earlier credential theorists, Boudon (1974) Collins (1979) and Brown (1995), adding information from his historical case study of an American high school. His arguments are clear and cogent, but for readers who anticipate new solutions to education's "crisis" there may be disappointment. In the final chapter, Labaree simply states: "Social mobility, I conclude, needs to be balanced by democratic equality and social efficiency, or else we wi ll continue to reproduce an educational system that is mired in consumerism and credentialism." The formula by which such a balance is to be achieved is not provided by Labaree. To be sure, credentialist theory has much to offer in describing the state of professionalism in American schooling today, and Labaree lays out its major themes clearly and concisely in his first chapter. In his next three chapters he focuses upon "the sorting and selecting of students within schools" by examining the historical roots, consequences, and implications of that process. This is followed by an analysis of education stratification from a market perspective. "From this perspective, the processes of selection and stratification that characterize education are the result not simply of societal needs but of individual demands, as individual consumers pursue symbolic advantages that will enhance their competitive position. The logic that governs these processes is that of the market." Labaree states that "arguments most often found in the literature [ldots] draw on either human capital theory or social reproduction theory," a practice he finds to be inadequate. But this is an unnecessary simplification of a large body of literature that has much to offer as well as to reject. Though he is rightly concerned about the slight of individual agency, Labaree's market individualism takes the other extreme, which is equally insufficient as an approach aimed at describing the "root causes" of education's woes. Consistent with liberalism, Labaree accepts the contradiction between corporate and democratic values as necessary and wants to promote both. That corporate capitalism undermines both political and educational democracy is well documented (e.g., Barrow, 1990; Callahan, 1962; Hollinger, 1996; Lustig, 1982; Ophuls, 1997; Weinstein, 1968). Rather than attempting to balance the conflicting goals by putting social needs above personal desires, a better solution is to make the two identical (Benedict, 1992). But Labaree gives no credence to the possibility of a democratic economic system that meets, as Bowles and Gintis (1992) phrase it, "the demanding criteria of fostering fundamental fairness, the dignity of the human person, and enhanced social participation" (p. 3). A major contention of Labaree is "that the central problems with education in the United States are not pedagogical or organizational or social or cultural in nature but are fundamentally political." Labaree claims a tie to Weber, but does not seem to appreciate that "class, status, and party" have to be grasped as phenomena of the distribution of power (Giddens, 1982). Thus, completely absent is any discussion of the influence of corporate power on schooling in particular and society as a whole (e. …

Gender and Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark

Abstract: Feminist analysis shows that the prevailing concepts of citizenship often assume a male citizen. How, then, does this affect the agency and participation of women in modern democracies? This insightful book, first published in 2000, presents a systematic comparison of the links between women's social rights and democratic citizenship in three different citizenship models: republican citizenship in France, liberal citizenship in Britain, and social citizenship in Denmark. Birte Siim argues that France still suffers from the contradictions of pro-natalist policy, and that Britain is only just starting to re-conceptualise the male-breadwinner model that is still a dominant feature. In her examination of the dual-breadwinner model in Denmark, Siim presents research about Scandinavian social policy and makes an important and timely contribution to debates in political sociology, social policy and gender studies.

Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency

Abstract: We are purposive agents; but we-adult humans in a broadly modern world-are more than that. We are reflective about our motivation. We form prior plans and policies that organize our activity over time. And we see ourselves as agents who persist over time and who begin, develop, and then complete temporally extended activities and projects. Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need in some way to advert to this trio of features-to our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our conception of our agency as temporally extended. These are, further, features that have great significance for the kinds of lives we can live. For these two reasons I will say that these are among the core features of human agency.' A theory of human action needs to say what these core features consist in and how they are related to each other.

Public pedagogy as cultural politics: stuart hall and the crisis of culture

Abstract: This article argues that Stuart Hall's work provides an important theoretical framework for developing an expanded notion of public pedagogy, for making the pedagogical central to any understanding of political agency, and for addressing the primacy of public pedagogy and cultural politics in any viable theory of social change. Hall's work becomes particularly important not only in making education crucial to the practice of cultural studies, but also in providing a theoretical and political corrective to recent attacks on cultural politics, which cut across ideological lines and include theorists as politically diverse as Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin.

The Future of Career: Renovating the psychology of careers for the twenty-first century

Abstract: Scrutinising the psychology of careers during the twentieth century requires a close examination of the cultural context in which organisational careers emerged, then flourished, and now languish. Following this analysis, the present chapter discusses how vocational psychology, a discipline born early in the twentieth century, has responded to cultural transformations that, as they reshape work and its social organisation, demand renovations in the psychology of careers. The context for career The editors of this volume define career broadly, ‘as the engagement of the individual with society through involvement in the organisation of work’. They do so to allow chapter authors to specify manifold meanings for career. Yet, in so doing, they highlight the very essence of career, the social context of work. Different social contexts condition different social arrangements of work. The dominant arrangements that have characterised a particular historical era and specific society have been usefully designated by different concepts, including vocation, craft, and career. From this perspective, my understanding of career has a particular meaning, embedded in twentieth-century culture and society in North America. This historical era gave rise to the essential structure that required most workers to construct careers within bureaucratic boundaries, thus defining the concept of career with a very specific meaning. Now, changes in that cultural context may be devitalising the concept and experience of career, or at least redefining its core meaning. To trace the rise and fall of career in North America, I examine social conventions, shared assumptions, and implicit values surrounding survival and procreation, that is work and family as central concerns of people.

Uncertainty, Production, Choice, and Agency: The State-Contingent Approach

Abstract: 1. States of nature 2. State-contingent production 3. Risk aversion, preferences, and probability 4. Indirect and dual representations of stochastic technologies 5. State-contingent production: the theory 6. Production with futures and forward markets 7. Production insurance 8. Production and non point source pollution regulation 9. The moral hazard problem 10. Endogenous reservation utility: agency and exploitation.

Discourse and the study of organization: Toward a structurational perspective

Abstract: Existing approaches to organizational discourse, which we label as 'managerialist', 'interpretive' and 'critical', either privilege agency at the expense of structure or the other way around. This tension reflects that between approaches to discourse in the social sciences more generally but is sharper in the organizational context, where discourse is typically temporally and contextually specific and imbued with attributions of instrumental intent. As the basis for a more sophisticated understanding of organizational discourse, we draw on the work of Giddens to develop a structurational conceptualization in which discourse is viewed as a duality of communicative actions and structural properties, recursively linked through the modality of actors' interpretive schemes. We conclude by exploring some of the theoretical implications of this conceptualization and its consequences for the methodology of organizational discourse analysis.abs>

Farewell to the working class

Abstract: By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialist tradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators took apocalyptic tones. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeply divided between the advocates of change (“New Times” required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politics could be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as before). By the mid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to present this contemporary transformation not as the “death of class,” but as the passing of one particular type of class society, one marked by the process of working-class formation between the 1880s and 1940s and the resulting political alignment, reaching its apogee in the social democratic construction of the postwar settlement. As long-term changes in the economy combined with the attack on Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the mid-1970s, the unity of the working class ceased to be available in the old and well-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While one dominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic male proletarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, with their associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration), another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place (predominantly female white-collar workers in services and all types of public employment). But the operative unity of this new working-class aggregation—its active agency as an organized political presence—is still very much in formation. To reclaim the political efficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of collective political agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the emerging conditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start of the twenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put back together again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old has been dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decomposition is yet to be replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into a new and coherently shaped form.

Reason Without Freedom: The Problem of Epistemic Normativity

Abstract: We call beliefs reasonable or unreasonable, justified or unjustified. What does this imply about belief? Does this imply that we are responsible for our beliefs and that we should be blamed for our unreasonable convictions? Or does it imply that we are in control of our beliefs and that what we believe is up to us? Reason Without Freedom argues that the major problems of epistemology have their roots in concerns about our control over and responsibility for belief. David Owens focuses on the arguments of Descartes, Locke and Hume - the founders of epistemology - and presents a critical discussion of the current trends in contemporary epistemology. He proposes that the problems we confront today - scepticism, the analysis of knowlege, and debates on epistemic justification - can be tackled only once we have understood the moral psychology of belief. This can be resolved when we realise that our responsibility for beliefs is profoundly different from our rationality and agency, and that memory and testimony can preserve justified belief without preserving the evidence which might be used to justify it. Reason Without Freedom should be of value to those interested in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind and action, ethics, and the history of 17th and 18th century.

Poststructuralist theory in practice: Working with ''behaviourally disturbed'' children

Abstract: In this paper we enter into the debate about the place of poststructuralist theorising and its relation to educational and psychological practices. We argue against a definition of poststructuralist theory as generating inaction and as antithetical to concepts such as ''agency'' and ''choice''. We suggest that poststructuralist theory may well have powerful implications for practice and we illustrate this through a close examination of practices in regular schools and in a school for ''behaviourally disturbed'' children. We show that through making the constitutive force of discourse visible, it is possible to work with students in ways that make them recognisable as legitimate students.

A Critical Archaeology Revisited

Abstract: In 1987, a small number of historical archaeologists issued a call for archaeologists to embrace the teachings of critical theory so that their research could be used to challenge societal structures of inequality. Although community partnering, an outgrowth of critical theory, has become increasingly important to archaeological practice, a true archaeological “praxis” has yet to be achieved. Possible reasons for this include a decontextualization of critical theory from its historical origin, the subsequent reification of capitalism in critical research, and the obscuring of agency in critical interpretations because of an emphasis on top‐down or macroscale models of society. We suggest that true praxis can be achieved in historical archaeology through a reconceptualization of the relationship between individuals and society and through a structuring of archaeological research that seeks to create a discursive relationship between past and present peoples and between researchers and community partners. W...

Language, structure and agency: What can realist social theory offer to sociolinguistics?

Abstract: The sociolinguistic enterprise raises fundamental questions about the nature of the relationships between social phenomena (such as social class or gender) and linguistic variation, while within social theory a persistent concern is the nature of the relationship between structure and agency. Sociolinguistics can draw on social theory for analysis of the relationship between speaker and system, the role of language in the creation, maintenance and change of social institutions, and the role of human agency in sociolinguistic phenomena. This article summarises the key tenets of a sociological realism, based on the recent work of Margaret Archer (in particular her exploration of analytical dualism) and of Derek Layder (specifically his theory of 'social domains'). It relates these ideas to sociolinguistics, arguing that language can be seen to have a different significance, depending on which domain is the focus of the researcher's interest. The article considers the distinctiveness of this approach, contrasting it with structuralist and social constructionist accounts and with structuration. It concludes by identifying some methodological implications, suggesting that sociological realism offers a productive theoretical framework for sociolinguistics in dealing with questions of language, structure and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rethinking political process in technological change : socio-technical configurations and frames

Abstract: The political process perspective has done much to enhance our understanding of the organizational effects of technological change as a negotiated outcome reflecting the political and power dynamics of the adopting context. In so doing, we suggest, technology has been marginalized as an analytical category and the problem of change agency, although better understood, remains largely unresolved. This article addresses these issues through the articulation of the concepts of socio-technical configurations and technological frames and explores their utility in understanding change agency through an action research project. The project sought a novel form of 'socio-technology' transfer, taking ideas and concepts of 'human-centered' manufacturing embodied in team-based cellular manufacture from a European context into three firms in Australia.

The political role of illness narratives.

Abstract: Cultural criticism is used to describe the political role of autobiographical illness narratives or pathographies. In expressing the subjective experience of illness, authors of pathographies illuminate ideological differences between patient and health care cultures, reveal the dominance of health care ideologies, and explicate patients' moral and political claims. The contributions of these literary works to nursing practice provide direction for relational restructuring. Gadow's concept of the relational narrative is proposed as a way to restore patient subjectivity and agency and establish the dialogue necessary for cultural pluralism in nursing and health care.

Paths to a historicized international political economy

Abstract: As a field of study, international political economy suffers from a significant historical deficit. Where this deficit is recognized, it is most commonly addressed by adding 'historical context' to the inquiry, as in the injunction to place globalization into its proper historical context. While this is a useful and necessary first step, it does not adequately address the problem of 'historicizing' IPE. In order to genuinely historicize IPE, we must first acknowledge the element of reflection which infuses each level of social inquiry, from how the object of investigation is framed and explored to how agency is considered in relation to particular issues. This means going beyond context and actors to ask what constitutes the form of knowledge appropriate to uncovering and remaking the social world. Historicizing IPE, in other words, demands that we interrogate our aims and purposes as openly as we explore the subject under study.

The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought

Abstract: The Promise of the City proposes a new theoretical framework for the study of cities and urban life. Finding the contemporary urban scene too complex to be captured by radical or conventional approaches, Kian Tajbakhsh offers a threefold, interdisciplinary approach linking agency, space, and structure. First, he says, urban identities cannot be understood through individualistic, communitarian, or class perspectives but rather through the shifting spectrum of cultural, political, and economic influences. Second, the layered, unfinished city spaces we inhabit and within which we create meaning are best represented not by the image of bounded physical spaces but rather by overlapping and shifting boundaries. And third, the macro forces shaping urban society include bureaucratic and governmental interventions not captured by a purely economic paradigm. Tajbakhsh examines these dimensions in the work of three major critical urban theorists of recent decades: Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Ira Katznelson. He shows why the answers offered by Marxian urban theory to the questions of identity, space, and structure are unsatisfactory and why the perspectives of other intellectual traditions such as poststructuralism, feminism, Habermasian Critical Theory, and pragmatism can help us better understand the challenges facing contemporary cities.

Women, culture, development: a new paradigm for development studies?

Abstract: We argue that existing approaches to development, including the women in development [WID] and gender and development [GAD] perspectives, fall short in their treatment of culture, and that a new paradigm, which we term 'Women, Culture and Development' [WCD], represents a way forward. Linking the fields of feminist studies, cultural studies and critical development studies, a WCD framework highlights culture as lived experiences and structures of feeling, attends to the relationship between production and reproduction in women's lives, and centres women's agency and struggles. A multi-ethnic and multiracial feminist approach to development studies, and an explicit engagement with culture can shift economistic and overly structural analyses to highlight the experiences, identities, practices and representations of Third World women. We illustrate the potential of a WCD paradigm with discussions of the environment and sexuality, and conclude with a sketch of the future visions and political possibilities of ...

Overcoming the structure – agency divide in small business research

Abstract: Explanations aimed at understanding the causes of variations in small business performance have tended towards either behavioural factors or structural explanations. However, this behavioural‐structural dichotomy replicates the traditional structure‐agency divide in social theory and consequently sets up artificial and unhelpful oppositions between agent‐centred (behaviouralist) models that ignore social formations and structuralist theories negate the role of human agency in dealing with social exigencies. This paper endeavours to transcend this limiting dichotomy by drawing on the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, to offer a more convincing framework for research on the small business sector.

Agency in tight corners: Narrative and initiative in African history

Abstract: This collection renders tribute on his retirement to Terence Ranger, whose emphasis on the capacity of Africans to resist, and sometimes to deflect what appears to be their structural fate has inspired a generation of African and Africanist historians This introduction first shows how Ranger has defended African historiography against structural pessimism, scepticism about its methods, and the charge of irrelevance It then argues that the nine contributors here share his view Their local case studies of linkages between the personal, the social, and the political, can in fact suggest answers to 'the big why questions' of larger historical process They do so by showing the forms in which these processes are in real life perceived, and contingently acted upon, by historically knowledgeable human agents

Aspects of the Client's Conscious Control of the Psychotherapeutic Process

Abstract: An analysis is made of the opening moments of dialogue between and a client and her therapist in the light of the client's commentary given during an Interpersonal Process Recall interview about the moments These moments are drawn from a study of 14 clients' reports on their experiences of therapy, thus particularizing the general understanding derived in the larger project This passage of dialogue was chosen because the client's commentary revealed that, in the brief space of time involved, she had exerted control in terms of the three main relationships as experienced by all clients in the larger study: the relationship with the self, the therapist, and the therapist's techniques Such control is understood to be an expression of clients' reflexivity, defined as self-awareness and agency within that self-awareness The understanding that there is an agential involvement in reflexivity is based on both the participants' reports and the author's examination of his own consciousness The study is discussed in terms of clients' covert experience of therapy and ways of gaining greater access to the unspoken in order to facilitate the working alliance

A Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Interactive Drama

Abstract: Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new form of AI-based interactive entertainment (Laurel 1986, Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall and Reilly 1992, Blumberg 1996, HayesRoth, van Gent and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed which combines plot and character into a full-fledged dramatic experience. The game industry has been producing plot-based interactive experiences (adventure games) since the beginning of the industry, but only a few of them (such as The Last Express) begin to approach the status of interactive drama. Part of the difficulty in achieving true interactive drama is due to the lack of a theoretical framework guiding the exploration of the technological and design issues surrounding interactive drama. This paper proposes a theory of interactive drama based on Aristotle's dramatic theory (Aristotle 330 BC) but modified to address the interactivity added by player agency. It is hoped that this theory will both provide design guidance for interactive dramatic experiences (answering the question "What should I build?") and technical direction for the AI work necessary to build the system (answering the question "How should I build it?"). This Neo-Aristotelian theory borrows from Laurel's treatment of Aristotle in an interactive context (Laurel 1986, Laurel 1991), but extends it by situating user agency within the model; the new model provides specific design guidelines for maximizing user agency. First I will briefly describe what I mean by interactive drama, and how drama differs from narrative. Then I will briefly describe Murray's (Murray 1998) three categories for analyzing interactive story experiences. For our purposes, agency will be the most important of these three categories. Next I will describe Aristotle's theory of drama and the integration of user agency into this theory. Finally I will draw some design and technology guidelines from the new theory.

The Foundations of Eclecticism: The Epistemological Status of Agency, Culture, and Structure in Social Theory

Abstract: The heated debates between proponents of rational-choice, culturalist, and structuralist (or historical institutionalist) analysis over method and substance derive from differences over philosophical issues. This article relates these differences between ideal-typical rationalist, culturalist and structuralist analysis to their positions on two fundamental problems in social theory: (i) the epistemological significance of structural principles vis-a-vis agency; and (ii) the relative significance of the material and ideal dimensions of social processes. This suggests that many recent efforts at `synthesis' (e.g. through `analytic narratives') end up being rhetorical gestures since the fundamental assumptions identified with a given approach are not significantly relaxed. A more pragmatic position has been outlined in `structurationist' perspectives that build on Weber's social theory. Such perspectives are consciously agnostic about epistemological first principles in order to permit more question-driven a...

Valuing nature in context: The contribution of common good approaches

Abstract: We draw on a number of empirical studies undertaken in the UK to show how residents and farmers come to contest scientific approaches to valuing nature as the basis for adjudicating conflicts over protected natural areas. The findings of these studies suggest that a widening of the knowledge base on which the goals and practices of nature conservation are founded, and a more deliberative process of decision making about what nature is important locally, is required if effective conservation partnerships are to be sustained. We offer a common good approach to valuing nature as a means of addressing this problem. A common good approach is based on ethical and moral concerns about nature and expresses these values through a social and political process of consensus building. We illustrate how this common good approach can be used to prioritise issues in a Local Environment Agency Plan. When linked with a method of Stakeholder Decision Analysis this common good approach is capable of building coalitions and a measure of consensus between different interests. It achieves this through a transparent and deliberate process of debate and systematic analysis of values that makes explicit the foundation of different knowledge claims about nature.