Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 2004"

Theorising media as practice

Abstract: This article explores the possibility of a new paradigm of media research that understands media, not as texts or structures of production, but as practice. Drawing on recent moves towards a theory of practice in sociology, this paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to study the whole range of practices that are oriented towards media and the role of media in ordering other practices in the social world. After setting this new paradigm in the context of the history of media research, the article reviews the key advantages of this paradigm in mapping the complexity of media‐saturated cultures where the discreteness of audience practices can no longer be assumed.

Handbook of experimental existential psychology

Abstract: Part 1: Introduction. Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Koole, Experimental Existential Psychology: Exploring the Human Confrontation with Reality. Part 2: Existential Realities. Solomon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, The Cultural Animal: Twenty Years of Terror Management Theory and Research. Arndt, Cook, Routledge, The Blueprint of Terror Management: Understanding the Cognitive Architecture of Psychological Defense against the Awareness of Death. Florian, Mikulincer, A Multifaceted Model of the Existential Meanings, Manifestations, and Consequences of the Fear of Personal Death. Goldenberg, Roberts, The Beast within the Beauty: An Existential Perspective on the Objectification and Condemnation of Women. Koole, van den Berg, Paradise Lost and Reclaimed: A Motivational Analysis of Human-Nature Relations. Taubman - Ben-Ari, Risk Taking in Adolescence: "To Be or Not to Be" Is Not Really the Question. Janoff-Bulman, Yopyk, Random Outcomes and Valued Commitments: Existential Dilemmas and the Paradox of Meaning. Part 3: Systems of Meaning and Value. Batson, Stocks, Religion: Its Core Psychological Functions. Tangney, Mashek, In Search of the Moral Person: Do You Have to Feel Really Bad to Be Good? Van den Bos, An Existentialist Approach to the Social Psychology of Fairness: The Influence of Mortality and Uncertainty Salience on Reactions to Fair and Unfair Events. McGregor, Zeal, Identity, and Meaning: Going to Extremes to Be One Self. Sedikides, Wildschut, Baden, Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions. Young, Morris, Existential Meanings and Cultural Models: The Interplay of Personal and Supernatural Agency in American and Hindu Ways of Responding to Uncertainty. Salzman, Halloran, Cultural Trauma and Recovery: Cultural Meaning, Self-Esteem, and the Reconstruction of the Cultural Anxiety Buffer. Dechesne, Kruglanski, Terror's Epistemic Consequences: Existential Threat and the Quest for Certainty and Closure. Jost, Fitzsimons, Kay, The Ideological Animal: A System Justification View. Part 4: The Human Connection. Mikulincer, Florian, Hirschberger, The Terror of Death and the Quest for Love: An Existential Perspective on Close Relationships. Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, Transcending Oneself through Social Identification. Haidt, Algoe, Moral Amplification and the Emotions That Attach Us to Saints and Demons. Case, Williams, Ostracism: A Metaphor for Death. Pinel, Long, Landau, Pyszczynski, I-Sharing, the Problem of Existential Isolation, and Their Implications for Interpersonal and Intergroup Phenomena. Wicklund, Vida-Grim, Bellezza in Interpersonal Relations. Part 5: Freedom and the Will. Bargh, Being Here Now: Is Consciousness Necessary for Human Freedom? Vohs, Baumeister, Ego Depletion, Self-Control, and Choice. Kuhl, Koole, Workings of the Will: A Functional Approach. Martin, Campbell, Henry, The Roar of Awakening: Mortality Acknowledgment as a Call to Authentic Living. Ryan, Deci, Autonomy Is No Illusion: Self-Determination Theory and the Empirical Study of Authenticity, Awareness, and Will. Kasser, Sheldon, Non-Becoming, Alienated Becoming, and Authentic Becoming: A Goal-Based Approach. Part 6: Postmortem. Koole, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, The Best of Two Worlds: Experimental Existential Psychology Now and in the Future.

The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu's Habitus

Abstract: This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1).

Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals

Abstract: Cultural studies seems to have passed into the shadows of academic interests, replaced by globalization and political economy as the new millennium's privileged concerns among left academics. Yet, cultural studies' longstanding interest in the interrelationship of power, politics, and culture remains critically important. Matters of agency, consciousness, pedagogy, and rhetoric are central to any public discourse about politics, not to mention education itself. Hence, this article argues that the promise of cultural studies, especially as a fundamental aspect of higher education, resides in a larger transformative and democratic politics in which matters of pedagogy and agency play a central role.

Europeanisation: Solution or Problem?

Abstract: Is there something new in recent research on Europeanisation? Or should we go back to what we already know about political integration in Europe and avoid the term? This article reviews recent work in four steps: the identification of the specific domain of Europeanisation; the relationship between Europeanisation, on the one hand, and governance, institutions, and discourse, on the other; the methodological problems and the models emerging in this new field of research; and an assessment of the results arising out of theoretical and empirical research. One theme throughout the article is that, in order to develop a progressive agenda, Europeanisation should be seen as a problem, not as a solution. It is neither a new theory, nor an ad-hoc approach. Rather, it is a way of orchestrating existing concepts and to contribute to cumulative research in political science. Europeanisation does not provide any simple fix to theoretical or empirical problems. Quite the opposite, it can deliver if approached as a set of puzzles. A problem in search of explanation - not the explanation itself (Gualini 2003). The conclusion is that Europeanisation has contributed to the emergence of new insights, original explanations, and interesting questions on three important issues: the understanding and analysis of 'impact', how to endogeneise international governance in models of domestic politics, and the relationship between agency and change. These three issues are prominent in the research agendas of international relations, theoretical policy analysis, and comparative politics. To contribute to major issues at the core of political science is a valuable result for a relatively new field of inquiry.

Towards Desistance: Theoretical Underpinnings for an Empirical Study

Abstract: This article presents the initial theoretical underpinnings for a fresh prospective study of desistance, focused on 20-year-old recidivists. It is argued that significant crime-free gaps appropriately form part of the subject matter of desistance. An interactive theoretical framework is presented, involving 'programmed potential', 'social context' (structures, culture, situations) and 'agency'. It is argued that agency, while rightly attracting increasing interest within criminology, needs to be used with greater precision. Aspects of the social context of the research subjects' lives are summarised, with special reference to their age-transitional status and the relevance of 'community' in their lives. Since most criminal careers, even of recidivists, are short, the implications of subjects' movement from conformity to criminality and back to conformity require greater thought among criminologists and criminal justice professionals. However, these broad movements contain significant oscillations, and 'crime' is not a unidimensional concept in the lives of the research subjects. Capturing and explaining the complexity of these matters longitudinally is a significant challenge for the research.

Self-Regulated Learning, Social Cognitive Theory, and Agency.

Abstract: The conception and theory of agency as self-regulation that is contained within Bandura's social cognitive theory is examined and elaborated in the context of the relevant philosophical history of ideas and through consideration of recent work in theoretical developmental psychology. Implications for self-regulated learning in classrooms are considered. In particular, it is suggested that the understanding of agency contained within social cognitive theory as elaborated herein might be developed as an alternative to conceptions of self-regulation and agency within constructivist and socioculturalist theorizing in educational psychology. However, the classroom application of such an alternative would require a much less dualistic and teacher-directed form of teaching than suggested in much past and current social cognitive work on self-regulation.

Paying Politicians: Theory and Evidence

Abstract: This paper looks at the theory behind the idea that paying politicians better will improve their performance. The paper lays out a political agency model with adverse selection and moral hazard where politicians are subject to two-period term limits. This model provides a number of predictions about how the pay of politicians affects agency problems. We also consider what happens when the pool of politicians is endogenous. The main ideas in the model are confronted with data on U.S. governors. (JEL: D72, J33)

HOW ADVERTISING PRACTITIONERS VIEW ETHICS : Moral Muteness, Moral Myopia, and Moral Imagination

Abstract: This study examines how advertising agency personnel perceive, process, and think about ethical issues. We conducted in-depth, elite interviews with advertising practitioners at all levels in 29 agencies in eight cities. Many of our informants reported few ethical concerns in their own work or in advertising in general. They exhibited "moral myopia," a distortion of moral vision that prevents moral issues from coming into focus, and "moral muteness," meaning that they rarely talk about ethical issues. We find that the reasons for moral muteness and moral myopia are categorizable. There were, however, "seeing/talking" advertising practitioners who demonstrated "moral imagination" when responding to ethical problems. We compare the manner in which the ethically sensitive practitioners contemplate and respond to ethical issues with those characterized as having moral muteness and moral myopia. We also find that the agency context in which advertising practitioners work is important in terms of ethical sensit...

Democratic dialogue in education : troubling speech, disturbing silence

Abstract: This collection brings into dialogue authors from a range of disciplines and perspectives to address the thorny question of how to balance the demands of « democratic dialogue with the reality of a world in which each voice does not carry equal weight. Should rules be in place, for example, that correct for such imbalances by privileging some voices or muting others? Should separate spaces be created from traditionally disadvantaged groups to speak only among themselves? Is democratic dialogue in an inclusive sense even a possibility in a world divided by multiple dimensions of power and privilege? Leading theorists from several countries share a concern for social justice and present radically different interpretations of what democracy means for educational practice. In a format unusual for such collections, the essays speak directly to each other about significant moral, philosophical, and practical differences regarding how to effectively engage students as critical participants in classrooms fraught with power and difference. The authors draw from philosophy, critical race theory, sociology, feminist, and poststructural studies to address topics including hate speech, freedom of expression, speech codes, the meanings of silence, conceptions of voice and agency, and « political correctness. They explore honestly and self-critically the troubling and disturbing dimensions of speech and silence that situate the classroom as a volatile microcosm of contemporary political contradictions.

Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop

Abstract: The notion of "everyday life" is ubiquitous in the contemporary intellectual scene. While scholars frequently use this concept to signal a romantic return to the "common people," Berger and Del Negro are among the first to subject the term to theoretical scrutiny. This book explores how everyday life has been used in three intellectual traditions (American folklore, British cultural studies and French everyday life theory) and suggests a program for revitalizing anti-elitist approaches to culture. The book draws on studies of performance from around the globe, including the authors' work on heavy metal in the U.S. and the Italian passeggiata (ritual promenade), to explore the term "identity." Moving beyond truisms that depict performance as a medium for the loss of self or folklore as means of expressing identity, the authors explore the interplay of culture and agency in performance to illuminate the complex dynamics of reflexivity, identity and self. This book will speak to anyone interested in power and aesthetics in performance.

Bringing children (and parents) into the sociology of consumption: Towards a theoretical and empirical agenda

Abstract: The sociology of consumption pays relatively little detailed and systematic theoretical attention to children, while the sociology of childhood tends to view children’s consumption through what can be called the ‘production of consumption’ approach. This is surprising given the range of empirical and theoretical debate in the sociology of consumption, where ‘mode of consumption’,‘consumption as aesthetics’ and ‘material culture’ represent a further three approaches. By bringing together the sociologies of childhood and consumption, a framework for empirical research is advanced. Four inter-related themes are suggested: learning to consume; lifestyle and identity formation; children’s engagements with material culture; and the parent-child relationship. It is argued that such a framework offers scope to further understandings of how cultures of consumption impact on children, children and parents, and construct notions of childhood. A focus on children’s consumption also represents an opportunity to clarif...

The Art of Good Hope

Abstract: What is hope? Though variously characterized as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a disposition, and even a process or activity, hope, more deeply, a unifying and grounding force of human agency. We cannot live a human life without hope, therefore questions about the rationality of hope are properly recast as questions about what it means to hope well. This thesis is defended and elaborated as follows. First, it is argued that hope is an essential and distinctive feature of human agency, both conceptually and developmentally. The author then explores a number of dimensions of agency that are critically implicated in the art of hoping well, drawing on several examples from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The article concludes with a short section that suggests how hoping well in an individual context may be extended to hope at the collective level.

Ontologies of place, placelessness, and movement: queer quests for identity and their impacts on contemporary geographic thought

Abstract: The rise of and reactions to identity politics and practice have precipitated renewed debates about ontology in geography. Actor‐network theory (ANT) and ‘non‐representational theory’ have much to offer these discussions. Their de‐centered notions of ‘agency’, topological (rather than Cartesian) spatial imaginations, and what I term ‘humble’ ontologies offer a way out of the seeming paradox presented by various binarisms underlying contemporary social theory and philosophy, such as structure/agency, essentialism/constructionism, subject/object, and theory/practice. The value of these approaches is very apparent when considering a particularly politicized form of identity practice: queer identity quests. They lead to (among other things) ontologies of place, placelessness and movement that are new, fresh, enriching and potentially empowering.

Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor

Abstract: ed and captured to perform gendered, nationalized, and raced work—forms of work and labor that can create class structures and class forms, and can distribute bodies along the international division of labor. In other words, by focusing on communicative labor we can understand how communication makes possible the invention of class. As a form of constituent power, however, labor can never be reduced to its capture, command, and control by capital. For Hardt and Negri the cooperative potential of affirmative labor, or more specifically, the qualitative significance of communicative and affective labor, generates a productive excess impossible to calculate and control. The social force of labor “appears simply as the power to act. . . . Anything that blocks this power to act is merely an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle that is eventually outflanked, weakened, and smashed by the critical powers of labor and the everyday passional wisdom of the affects” (2000, 358). Living labor’s power to act demonstrates an ability to challenge and create new values. Therefore, rhetorical agency comes first; it realizes the value necessary for the current regime of capital and the values necessary to challenge the current regime of governance. What does this mean for the political dimensions of rhetorical agency? It means that politics cannot be disconnected from the sphere of bio-political production. To do so would be to provide a place where the revolutionary energy of communicative labor becomes harnessed to the 203 RHETORICAL AGENCY AS COMMUNICATIVE LABOR social division of labor. To take the example of free speech, when free speech becomes a political right disconnected from the constitutive power of labor, it becomes possible to balance the right of free speech against societal protection. In this way, the domain of the political-legal becomes a space for coercive restrictions on the constitutive power of labor. Being political, as Engin Isen highlights, is to disagree with the dominant regime of citizenship. Recall that the political dimension of communicative labor is built into bio-political production’s attempt to harness and capture the constitutive power of communication. As living labor, communication acts; there is no anxiety here about the status of rhetorical agency, because its action generates the value of living labor. Rhetorical agency is everywhere. To fully flesh out the politics of living labor requires a future study on how communicative labor provides new technologies and strategies for a temporal and spatial disagreement with the command logics of bio-po-

The Folk Psychology of Free Will: Fits and Starts

Abstract: According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.

Disappearing youth: Youth as a social shifter in Botswana

Abstract: In this article, I explore the discourses of youth in Botswana, focusing the analysis on 1995 protests over the murder of a student. I argue that youth should be examined as a social shifter: When invoked, youth indexes sets of social relationships that are dynamic and constructed in the invocation. As people argue over who youth are and how they behave, they index shifting relationships of power and authority, responsibility and capability, agency and autonomy, and the moral configurations of society.

ACTORS, NORMS, AND IMPACT: Recent International Cooperation Theory and the Influence of the Agent-Structure Debate

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This article reviews three recent developments in international cooperation theory: the introduction of nonstate actors, the study of norms and ideas, and increased examination of the effectiveness, or impact, of international cooperation. Through the lens of the agent-structure debate, we critique the literature that addresses these themes. We argue, first, for a view of structure that goes beyond material properties; second, that more attention could be paid to what distinguishes agency in actors; and third, that this would provide insights into how reflexivity and learning, as well as preference and identity formation, contribute to structural transformation in the international system through iterated processes of cooperation. We also develop ways of applying the agent-structure debate to empirical as well as metatheoretical questions. The article concludes by discussing directions for further research.

Toward a critical theory of untidy geographies: the spatiality of emotions in consumption and production

Abstract: This paper offers a non-essentialist, normative view of the spatiality of emotions in consumption and production, underscoring issues of difference in everyday life. As people interweave thoughts and feelings across spheres of life, over time, economic and noneconomic logics become blurred, leading to multiple, often conflicting sentiments. Cognitive dissonance is not necessarily resolved and manifests in incoherent consumer practices. Understanding individuals' often covert disarticulation from communities can help proactively uncover avenues for expressing agency within structures of constraint. The geographies of multiple logics also clarify behavior in production regarding thoughts and feelings emanating from outside the workplace. Managers can use this knowledge to achieve competitiveness by accommodating workers' needs and nurturing collaboration, tapping overlapping social networks across time and space. Thinking normatively about the spatiality of emotions requires analytical fluidity to relate co...

Scaling up and Bearing Down in Discourse Analysis: Questions Regarding Textual Agencies and Their Context:

Abstract: This paper assesses the contributions that discourse analysis and organizational discourse theory can make to our understanding of organization and organizing. By clarifying the theoretical assumptions that underpin this work, especially its social constructivist credentials, it is possible to show the potential of this methodology. A discursive approach can help answer a series of questions that interest organizational theorists: the constitution question of how local interactions develop organizing properties; the scaling-up question concerning the identification of characteristics that imbue certain texts and their authors with agency; as well as how grand discourses bear down on organizational life and how practices of consumption relate to acts of resistance.

The strength of a weak agency: Enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 civil rights act and the expansion of state capacity, 1965-1971

Abstract: This article analyzes the anomalous case of early Title VII enforcement to challenge the standard political‐institutional (PI) account of state capacity. Title VII prohibited employment discrimination, but the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was granted scant enforcement resources. Yet the early EEOC aggressively enforced and developed Title VII. To solve the anomaly, the authors integrate insights from the literatures on social movements and the sociology of law. In the absence of conventional administrative resources, apparently weak state agencies can expand their capacity through the legal strategy of broad statutory construction. This strategy is more likely with the presence of social movement pressure from below. The authors argue that state capacity is a “moving target,” with state and societal actors building on legal as well as administrative resources to construct and transform capacity. By reconceptualizing state capacity, the authors contribute to nuanced explanations of state policy ...

Living with plants and the exploration of botanical encounter within human geographic research practice

Abstract: Explorations of the boundaries between human culture and non-human nature have clear ethical dimensions. Developing both from philosophical arguments about the value of such boundaries and recent empirical work following the traffic across them, we seek to complement these discussions through a consideration of how these boundaries can be enacted by ourselves, as researchers, and the methods we employ. As part of an agenda seeking to reconsider organic agency within geographical narrative, we have been exploring different techniques for documenting the ways in which such agencies are encountered. Specifically, we are interested in plants and the ways in which they might be researched in new ways by human geographers. Based on two particular pieces of research into human-plant dealings, our aim is one of exploring their lively presence as part of a performative environmental ethics enacted, in part, through the very practice of the research encounter. © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Alternative Perspectives on the Role of Text and Agency in Constituting Organizations

Abstract: Organizational discourse analysis, as an area of research, has grown in the past decade. Most scholars posit that language, regardless of the discursive form, is critical to the very nature of an organization. This article contends that discourse is more than an artifact or a reflection of an organization; rather it forms the foundation for organizing and for developing the notion oforganization as an entity. The articles in this volume present different perspectives on the role of text and agency in contributing to the constitution of organizations. Although the concept of text has different meanings in these articles, it refers, in general, to the medium of communication, collection of interactions, and assemblages of oral and written forms. Whether influenced by interaction analysis, structuration theory, text/conversation analysis or textual agency, these essays demonstrate how textuality in all its various forms participates in the production and reproduction of organizational life.

Critical discourse studies: where to from here?

Abstract: This paper surveys critical discourse studies to the present and claims that, to avoid lapsing into comfortable orthodoxy in its mature phase, CDS needs to reassert its transformative radical teleology. The initial part of the paper reasserts the need for a strong social theory given the materialist and context-bound nature of discourse in daily activity. From this basis, the paper then characterizes the “new times” in which contemporary discourse occurs, and briefly surveys those issues typically analyzed, namely political economy, race and gender, and critical literacy. By considering people's ordinary lives, the paper then suggests that subject and agency, and calculative technologies of management deserve, and new modalities need, more research. Transdisciplinarity is encouraged, particularly with social psychology and critical management studies.

Anger economy and female agency: problematizing "prostitution" and "sex work" among the Huli of Papua New Guinea.

Abstract: Womens studies anthropology and international health all share an intellectual and albeit in different ways an activist or applied interest in prostitution/sex work and this interest has recently intensified amid concerns about the AIDS pandemic and global "trafficking" in women. These three fields have also shared an evolution in the terminology naming their object of study: from prostitution to sex work to most recently sexual networking and survival sex. This evolution reflects a desire to shift the discursive fields surrounding monetized sexual exchanges from moral to economic terms. In other words while there has been heated debate both within and among these different disciplines about how prostitution should be understood whether and how national and international bodies should intervene in its practice and who should represent it or speak for it there has been some basic agreement that of the various terms to choose from sex work in particular is a better label--better in that it may more accurately represent what women feel they are doing when they engage in monetized sexual exchanges (i.e. working) and their reasons for doing so (i.e. economic need). (excerpt)

How ought we to understand the concept of rhetorical agency? Report from the ARS

Abstract: One of the primary discussions at last fall's meeting of the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies addressed the question, “How ought we to understand the concept of rhetorical agency?” Several developments are worthy of note. First, although concern with agency began as a rear guard action against the post‐modern critique, the discussion appears to have shifted to more productive investigations into the consciousness and conditions of agency. Second, a growing number of scholars acknowledge that rhetoric as an interpretive theory describes a variety of rhetorical positions, some with more and some with less rhetorical agency. Rhetoric still faces the issue, however, of incorporating this knowledge into rhetoric's mission as a productive art.