Showing papers on "Agency (philosophy) published in 2006"

Toward a Psychology of Human Agency

Abstract: This article presents an agentic theory of human development, adaptation, and change. The evolutionary emergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. Social cognitive theory rejects a duality between human agency and social structure. People create social systems, and these systems, in turn, organize and influence people's lives. This article discusses the core properties of human agency, the different forms it takes, its ontological and epistemological status, its development and role in causal structures, its growing primacy in the coevolution process, and its influential exercise at individual and collective levels across diverse spheres of life and cultural systems.

Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject

Abstract: In Anthropology and Social Theory the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings—specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu—requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world. Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner’s theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner’s characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.

The personal and professional selves of teachers: stable and unstable identities

Abstract: In much educational literature it is recognised that the broader social conditions in which teachers live and work, and the personal and professional elements of teachers' lives, experiences, beliefs and practices are integral to one another, and that there are often tensions between these which impact to a greater or lesser extent upon teachers' sense of self or identity. If identity is a key influencing factor on teachers' sense of purpose, self‐efficacy, motivation, commitment, job satisfaction and effectiveness, then investigation of those factors which influence positively and negatively, the contexts in which these occur and the consequences for practice, is essential. Surprisingly, although notions of ‘self’ and personal identity are much used in educational research and theory, critical engagement with individual teachers' cognitive and emotional ‘selves’ has been relatively rare. Yet such engagement is important to all with an interest in raising and sustaining standards of teaching, particularly in centralist reform contexts which threaten to destabilise long‐held beliefs and practices. This article addresses the issue of teacher identities by drawing together research which examines the nature of the relationships between social structures and individual agency; between notions of a socially constructed, and therefore contingent and ever‐remade, ‘self’, and a ‘self’ with dispositions, attitudes and behavioural responses which are durable and relatively stable; and between cognitive and emotional identities. Drawing upon existing research literature and findings from a four‐year Department for Education and Skills funded project with 300 teachers in 100 schools which investigated variations in teachers' work and lives and their effects on pupils (VITAE), it finds that identities are neither intrinsically stable nor intrinsically fragmented, as earlier literature suggests. Rather, teacher identities may be more, or less, stable and more or less fragmented at different times and in different ways according to a number of life, career and situational factors.

Agency and Institutions: The Enabling Role of Individuals’ Social Position:

Abstract: Although early neo-institutional studies did not explicitly tackle the issue of agency, more recent studies about institutional entrepreneurship have brought it to the forefront. Institutional entrepreneur-ship has been presented as a promising way to account for institutional change endogenously. However, this notion faces the paradox of embedded agency. To overcome this paradox, it is necessary to explain under what conditions actors are enabled to act as institutional entrepreneurs. Some neo-institutional theorists have already addressed this issue. Their studies focus mainly on the organizational and organizational field levels of analysis. In this paper, I aim to complement their work by examining under what conditions individuals are more likely to engage in institutional entrepreneurship. By doing so, I take into account the individual level of analysis that neo-institutional theorists often tend to neglect. Relying on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of fields, I propose that individuals’ social posit...

Strategy as Practical Coping: A Heideggerian Perspective

Abstract: What strategic actors actually do in practice has become increasingly the focus of strategy research in recent years. This paper argues that, in furthering such practice-based views of strategy, we need a more adequate re-conceptualization of agency, action and practice and how they interrelate. We draw from the work of the continental philosopher Martin Heidegger to articulate a relational theory of human agency that is better suited to explaining everyday purposive actions and practices. Specifically, we argue that the dominant ‘building’ mode of strategizing that configures actors (whether individual or organizational) as distinct entities deliberately engaging in purposeful strategic activities derives from a more basic ‘dwelling’ mode in which strategy emerges non-deliberately through everyday practical coping. Whereas, from the building perspective, strategy is predicated upon the prior conception of plans that are then orchestrated to realize desired outcome, from a dwelling perspective strategy do...

Practising Gender at Work: Further Thoughts on Reflexivity

Abstract: In an effort to make visible the subtle and seldom acknowledged aspects of gendering dynamics, Martin focuses on unreflexive practices that both communicate and constitute gender in paid work settings. She reviews the distinction between practices that are culturally available to ‘do gender’ and the literal practising of gender that is constituted through interaction. While acknowledging that agency is involved in any practicing of gender, she considers how intentionality and agency intersect, arguing that people in powerful positions routinely practise gender without being reflexive about it. Defining practising as emergent, directional, temporal, rapid, immediate and indeterminate, Martin shows how these qualities affect men as well as women in unexpected and often harmful ways. She concludes with a call for innovative ways to ‘catch gender in practice’ and for attention to reflexivity's role in the ongoing constitution of gender at work.

From Individual to Collective Capabilities: The Capability Approach as a Conceptual Framework for Self‐help

Abstract: This paper emphasizes the importance of collectivities for human capabilities. Using the example of self‐help, the paper demonstrates how the poor can act together to expand and exercise new ‘collective capabilities’. The paper argues that the Capability Approach (CA), with its emphasis on freedoms and agency, is a suitable — however insufficient — conceptual framework for self‐help analysis. It points out the limitations of the CA in capturing the interactive relationship between individual capabilities and social structures. To incorporate this ‘collective’ dimension within the CA, the paper re‐emphasizes the intrinsic and instrumental value of social structures, explores the concepts of collective freedoms and collective agency, and compliments the CA with the literature on collective action, institutions and social capital into an integrated analytical framework for ‘collective capabilities’. The paper finally operationalizes this framework through three case studies of self‐help initiatives among the...

Rediscovering empathy : agency, folk psychology, and the human sciences

Abstract: In this timely and wide-ranging study, Karsten Stueber argues that empathy is epistemically central for our folk-psychological understanding of other agents--that it is something we cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds. Setting his argument in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and the interdisciplinary debate about the nature of our mindreading abilities, Stueber counters objections raised by some in the philosophy of social science and argues that it is time to rehabilitate the empathy thesis.Empathy, regarded at the beginning of the twentieth century as the fundamental method of gaining knowledge of other minds, has suffered a century of philosophical neglect. Stueber addresses the plausible philosophical misgivings about empathy that have been responsible for its failure to gain widespread philosophical acceptance.Crucial in this context is his defense of the assumption, very much contested in contemporary philosophy of mind, that the notion of rational agency is at the core of folk psychology. Stueber then discusses the contemporary debate between simulation theorists--who defend various forms of the empathy thesis--and theory theorists. In distinguishing between basic and reenactive empathy, he provides a new interpretive framework for the investigation into our mindreading capacities. Finally, he considers epistemic objections to empathy raised by the philosophy of social science that have been insufficiently discussed in contemporary debates. Empathy theorists, Stueber writes, should be prepared to admit that, although empathy can be regarded as the central default mode for understanding other agents, there are certain limitations in its ability to make sense of other agents; and there are supplemental theoretical strategies available to overcome these limitations.

Indigenous People and Environmental Politics

Abstract: Modernity has helped to popularize, and at the same time threaten, indigeneity. Anthropologists question both the validity of the concept of indigeneity and the wisdom of employing it as a political tool, but they are reluctant to deny it to local communities, whose use of the concept has become subject to study. The concept of indigenous knowledge is similarly faulted in favor of the hybrid products of modernity, and the idea of indigenous environmental knowledge and conservation is heatedly contested. Possibilities for alternate environmentalisms, and the combining of conservation and development goals, are being debated and tested in integrated conservation and development projects and extractive reserves. Anthropological understanding of both state and community agency is being rethought, and new approaches to the study of collaboration, indigenous rights movements, and violence are being developed. These and other current topics of interest involving indigenous peoples challenge anthropologic...

The problem of peace: understanding the ‘liberal peace’

Abstract: To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace. Pope John Paul II, 1 1981 Pax Invictis2 Virtue runs amok. Attributed to G.K. Chesterton This essay examines the development of the liberal peace, identifying its internal components and the often-ignored tensions between them. The construction of the liberal peace, and its associated discourses and practices in post-conflict environments is far from coherent. It is subject to significant intellectual and practical shortcomings, not least related to its focus on political, social, and economic reforms as mainly long-term institutional processes resting on the reform of governance. It thereby neglects interim issues such as the character, agency and needs of civil society actors, especially related to the ending of war economies, and their replacement with frameworks that respond to individual social and economic needs, as well as political needs. The resultant peace is therefore often very flimsy and at best ‘virtual’, rather than emancipatory.

The Emergence of New Global Institutions: A Discursive Perspective

Abstract: We examine how a new discourse shapes the emergence of new global regulatory institutions and, specifically, the roles played by actors and the texts they author during the institution-building process, by investigating a case study of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and its relationship to the new environmental regulatory discourse of ‘precaution’. We show that new discourses do not neatly supplant legacy discourses but, instead, are made to overlap and interact with them through the authorial agency of actors, as a result of which the meanings of both are changed. It is out of this discursive struggle that new institutions emerge.

Unravelling the contexts of stigma: from internalisation to resistance to change

Abstract: This special edition on ‘Understanding and Challenging Stigma’ seeks to further our understandings of the types of representations and practices through which stigma is perpetuated, the social contexts within which they are produced and reproduced, and the possibilities for agency, resistance and intervention. In this introductory piece, we outline three broad approaches to stigma in the existing literature—individual, macro-social and multi-level. Aligning ourselves with the latter, we discuss how social effects become sedimented in the individual psyche in ways that often make it difficult for stigmatised group members to resist their devalued social status. This insight frames our discussion of the papers in this volume—which cover various types of stigma, drawing on research in six countries. We focus on the ways in which the papers contribute to our understandings of (i) the material, political, institutional and symbolic contexts of stigma; (ii) the possibility of resistance to stigma; and (iii) the types of interventions most likely to facilitate such resistance. We conclude that the fields of social and community psychology have a central role to play in advancing the types of understandings that are so urgently needed to inform effective multi-level stigma-reduction interventions. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Individuality and the Group: Advances in Social Identity

Abstract: Social identity research has transformed psychology and the social sciences. Developed around intergroup relations, perspectives on social identity have now been applied fruitfully to a diverse array of topics and domains, including health, organizations and management, culture, politics and group dynamics. In many of these new areas, the focus has been on groups, but also very much on the autonomous individual. This has been an exciting development, and has prompted a rethinking of the relationship between personal identity and social identity - the issue of individuality in the group. This book brings together an international selection of prominent researchers at the forefront of this development. They reflect on the issue of individuality in the group and on how thinking about social identity has changed. Together, these chapters chart a key development in the field: how social identity perspectives inform understanding of cohesion, unity and collective action, but also how they help us understand individuality, agency, autonomy, disagreement, and diversity within groups. This text is valuable to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students studying social psychology where intergroup relations and group processes are a central component. Given its wider reach, however, it will also be of interest to those in cognate disciplines where social identity perspectives have application potential.

The ambivalence of professional identity: On cynicism and jouissance in audit firms

Abstract: This article explores how identity is self-managed in professional services firms, illustrated by the Big Four audit firms. We examine both identification and distancing processes with several identity attributes of professionalism, viewed here as outcomes of technologies of the self. We argue that the ambivalence inherent in these attributes enables auditors to more or less cynically distance themselves from the regulatory structures of their environment, forming jouissance with rules and regulation. The study, empirical in nature, contributes to an understanding of the mutual constitution of power and identity in the area of employee resistance to organizational control. As distancing from the organizational culture and the professional ideology appears to be more symbolic of individual agency than truly harmful, we conclude that jouissance may potentially enhance the firms’ performance in the short term. Yet, prolonged cynical attitudes may transform professionals into ‘compliant’ employees, who may no...

Children’s Agency and Educational Norms: A tensed negotiation

Abstract: ‘Children as social actors’ and ‘children’s participation’ are key concepts in present-day discourse and form a significant paradigm shift for the educational sciences, inspired by sociology of childhood. Some critical comments can however be made on how these concepts are transcribed into practice. A historical perspective, connecting the micro and the macro level, investigates how the new paradigm may be linked to discursive fields related to neoliberalism and its specific shifts in governmentality. These critical comments are inspired by a historical research into 150 years of governing children and families in Belgium. The discussion is necessary in order to evaluate whether and how the inclusive discourse on children can in turn exclude specific groups of children and adults in late modernity.

Joint Actions and Group Agents

Abstract: Joint action and group agency have emerged as focuses of attention in recent social theory and philosophy but they have rarely been connected with one another. The argument of this article is that whereas joint action involves people acting together to achieve any sort of result, group agency requires them to act together for the achievement of one result in particular: the construction of a centre of attitude and agency that satisfies the usual constraints of consistency and rationality in adequate measure. The main discovery in the recent theory of group agency is that this result is not easily achieved; no regular voting procedure will ensure, for example, that a group of individually consistent agents will display consistency in group judgments.

On emergence, agency, and organization

Abstract: Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles; boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and constraint construc- tion; and choice and action that have evolved to respond to food or poison. When combined with the arguments from preadaptation and multiple realizability, the existence of these agents is sufficient to establish ontological emergence as against what one might call Weinbergian reductionism. Minimal biological agents are emphatically not conscious agents, and accepting their existence does not commit one to any robust theory of human agency. Nor is there anything mystical, dualistic, or non-empirical about the emergence of agency in the biosphere. Hence the emergence of molecular autonomous agents, and indeed ontological emergence in general, is not a negation of or limitation on careful biological study but simply one of its implications.

Agency and autonomy in Kant's moral theory

Abstract: 1. Kant's Theory of Moral Sensibility: Respect for the Moral Law and the Influence of Inclination 2. Hedonism, Heteronomy, and Kant's Principle of Happiness 3. The Categorical Imperative and Kant's Conception of Practical Rationality 4. Legislating the Moral Law 5. Autonomy of the Will as the Foundation of Morality 6. Legislating for a Realm of Ends: The Social Dimension of Autonomy 7. Agency and Universal Law 8. Duties to Oneself and Self-Legislation 9. Agency and the Imputation of Consequences in Kant's Ethics

Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won't Come from What Is Constitutive of Action

Abstract: There is a fairly widespread-and very influential-hope among phi losophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and, more generally, metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. What we need, so the thought goes, is to better understand what action and agency consist in. With this under standing in hand, we will then have all that we need in order to give a philosophical account of reasons for action, or of (practical) normativ ity altogether.

Professionalism and performativity: the feminist challenge facing early years practitioners

Abstract: In this discussion paper, I seek to understand the complex interaction between notions of ‘professionalism’ and gendered identity constructions against the backdrop of increased state regulation and demands for performativity in the early years. I seek to explore the ways in which ‘teacher professionalism’ is constructed by government and how this transcends into a ‘discourse of derision’, which then becomes a subtle, yet powerful, means of controlling this occupational group. I conclude by presenting an alternative feminist conceptual framework for assessing the gendered nature of identity formation, and as an opportunity to consider the role agency can play when seeking to resist/renegotiate the rapid and powerful policy reform agenda in the early years.

Neuroethics: defining the issues in theory, practice, and policy

Abstract: PART I - NEUROSCIENCE, ETHICS, AGENCY AND THE SELF 1 Moral decision-making and the brain 2 A case study in neuroethics: the nature of moral judgment 3 Moral and legal responsibility and the new neuroscience 4 Brains, lies and psychological explanations 5 Being in the world: neuroscience and the ethical agent 6 Creativity, gratitude and the enhancement debate: 7 Ethical dilemmas in neurodegenerative disease: respecting patients at the twlight of agency PART II - NEUROETHICS IN PRACTICE 8 From genome to brainome: charting the lessons learned 9 Protecting human subjects in brain research: a pragmatic perspective 10 Facts, fictions and the future of neuroethics 11 A picture is worth 1000 words, but which 1000? 12 When genes and brains unite: ethical implications of genomic neuroimaging 13 Engineering the brain 14 Transcranial magnetic stimulation and the human brain: an ethical evaluation 15 Functional neurosurgical intervention: neuroethics in the operating room 16 Clinicians, patients and the brain PART III - JUSTICE, SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND NEUROETHICS 17 The social effects of advances in neuroscience: legal problems, legal perspectives 19 Poverty, privilege and brain development: empirical findings and ethical implications 20 Religious responses to neuroscientific questions 21 The mind in the movies: a neuroethical analysis of the portrayal of the mind in popular media

The Natural Origins of Economics

Abstract: References to the economy are ubiquitous in modern life, and virtually every facet of human activity has capitulated to market mechanisms. In the early modern period, however, there was no common perception of the economy, and discourses on money, trade, and commerce treated economic phenomena as properties of physical nature. Only in the early nineteenth century did economists begin to posit and identify the economy as a distinct object, divorcing it from natural processes and attaching it exclusively to human laws and agency. In "The Natural Origins of Economics", Margaret Schabas traces the emergence and transformation of economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a natural to a social science. Focusing on the works of several prominent economists - David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill - Schabas examines their conceptual debt to natural science and thus locates the evolution of economic ideas within the history of science. An ambitious study, "The Natural Origins of Economics" will be of interest to economists, historians, and philosophers alike.

Doing Collective Biography: Investigating the production of subjectivity

Abstract: 'At last a book that not only describes what collective biography is but also explains how to use it! The book describes how to set up collective biography workshops in which participants examine how discursive structures and power relations have both enabled and limited the conditions of possibility for their lived experience. Focusing on a more complicated reflexivity than is usually described in social science research, collective biography, inspired by Frigga Haug and refined by Davies, will no doubt be used increasingly by researchers interested in the production of subjects in a postmodern world' - Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, University of Georgia, USA. This book introduces the reader to collective biography, an innovative research methodology for use in education and the social sciences. The methodology of collective biography overcomes the theory/practice divide, by putting theory to use in everyday life, and using everyday life to understand and to extend theory." Doing Collective Biography" provides guidelines for developing a collective biography project and demonstrates how these guidelines emerged from and were shaped by projects on such topics as subjectivity, power, agency, reflexivity, literacy, gender, and neoliberalism at work. Each chapter gives a detailed example of collective biography in practice, showing how a group of students and/or scholars can work collaboratively to investigate aspects of the production of subjectivity, and clearly demonstrates how poststructural theory can be elaborated and refracted through the experiences of ordinary everyday life. This is key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on Education and social science courses with a research element, as well as for academics and professionals undertaking research projects.

Northern Theory: The Political Geography of General Social Theory

Abstract: The relationship between geopolitical position and general social theory is examined by a detailed reading of three important texts, Coleman’s Foundations of Social Theory, Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice, and Giddens’s Constitution of Society. Effects of metropolitan position are traced in theoretical strategies, conceptions of time and history, models of agency, ideas of modernity, and other central features of their theorizing. Four textual moves are identified that together constitute the northernness of general social theory: claiming universality, reading from the center, gestures of exclusion, and grand erasure. Some alternative paths for theory, embodying different relations with the global South, are briefly indicated.

The concept of a cultural landscape:nature, culture and agency in the land

Abstract: The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report issued in April 2005 shows how severely our civilisation is degrading and overstressing the natural systems that support human life and all other lives on earth. An important critical challenge, especially for the eco-humanities, is to help us understand the conceptual frameworks and systems that disappear the crucial support provided by natural systems and prevent us from seeing nature as a field of agency. This paper considers the currently popular concept of a cultural landscape as an example of a concept that downplays natural agency, and discusses the epistemology of nature scepticism and nature cynicism that often accompanies its vogue in the humanities. Can some philosophical disentangling of senses of nature (often considered the most complex term in the language) allow sceptics their main points without placing them on such a strong collision course with the requirements of commonsense and survival?

How Nothing Became Something: White Space, Rhetoric, History, and Meaning

Abstract: We seek to advance visual theory in the domain of commercial rhetoric (advertising) by demonstrating how objects and symbols derive meaning from their histories. We do this by examining a single visual trope common in advertising, white space. The choice of white space was purposeful in that it is not a picture and its history is both accessible and traceable. Our sociohistorical theory is supported by showing how specific movements and social forces acted upon the meaning of this particular visual rhetorical device and how this meaning is today shared and understood by both producers of ads (ad agency creative directors) and the readers of ads (ordinary consumers). We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this approach to rhetorical and other major theoretical formulations.