Agency (philosophy)

About: Agency (philosophy) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10461 publications have been published within this topic receiving 350831 citations. The topic is also known as: Thought & Human agency.

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

Climate Change, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Reconceptualizing Societal–Environment Interaction Within a Socially Constructed Adaptive Landscape

Abstract: This article reconceptualizes current analyses of adaptation and vulnerability to climate change within an evolutionary theory of social change premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter describes a negotiated and contested fitness terrain. Individual and corporate actors simultaneously adapt to and actively manipulate this terrain by using alternative collective action frames, mobilizing resources, and creating or exploiting political opportunities in order to legitimate or delegitimate social structures and their associated technologies at various levels of analysis. Adaptation is conceptualized as occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice, and populational mechanisms. Vulnerability results from the adaptive failure of social structures sustaining individual and collective health, livelihood, and well-being. This framework combines organizational sociologists’ insights into structure–environment interaction; constructionists’ attention to agency,...

The Moodiness of Action

Abstract: This article argues that the concept of moodiness provides significant resources for developing a more robust pragmatist theory of action. Building on current conceptualizations of agency as effort by relational sociologists, it turns to the early work of Talcott Parsons to outline the theoretical presuppositions and antinomies endemic to any such conception; William James and John Dewey provide an alternative conception of effort as a contingent rather than fundamental form of agency. The article then proposes a way forward to a nonvoluntarist theory of action by introducing the notion of moodiness, highlighting how the concept permits a richer conceptualization of actors’ prereflexive involvement in and relatedness to nonneutral, demanding situations. Effort is reconceptualized as a moment in a broader process of action, where the mood is fragile and problematical. Finally, the article draws all of these elements together in an outline of a unified portrait of the pragmatist action cycle that includes both creativity and moodiness as essential moments.

Negotiating Tensions in Developing Organizational Policy Capacity: Comparative Lessons to be Drawn

Abstract: This article explores how organizational policy capacity can be developed, drawing on a study conducted in a large human services agency in Australia. Building policy capacity within government agencies is widely acknowledged as important for successfully responding to complex policy problems. The existing literature suggests a range of strategies for building organizational capacity. Findings from interviews with policy workers support the principles for building policy capacity identified in the literature but uncovered a surprising degree of scepticism pointing to significant barriers to their realization. These barriers are identified as emerging out of the tensions between policy capacity and two other domains of governing capacity: administrative capacity and state capacity. These tensions however are highly contingent and dynamic; managing them requires a degree of discretion and judgement, in brief, policy leadership. A focus on developing policy leadership at the level of policy units an...

“Actor‐Network Theory” and International Relationality: Lost (and Found) in Translation

Abstract: Like any multiplicity, “actor-network theory” is many things: an influential current within the sociology of science and technology; a relational and anti-essentialist form of materialism; an insistence that notions of agency not be confined to human subjects but embrace objects, devices, and other non-human entities; and much else besides. Actor-network theory was initially developed as a way of making sense of the social life of the laboratory and the complex paths that scientific knowledge takes from untidy practice to incontestable “fact.” Its founders, including Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and their collaborators, have since sought to apply these initial insights to a wide range of other arenas of social and political life. In the process, actor-network theory (ANT) has given us a wealth of concepts. The idea of the actor network itself embodies a productive tension, putting structure and agency into an intimate relationship in which the network is made up of actors who are, in turn, the effects of the network. In their attention to the concrete and contested ways in which knowledge is produced and circulated, ANT scholars have also pointed to the centrality of what Callon and Latour have called inscriptions , the various pieces of paper, devices, graphs, and computer programs through which actors seek to translate the messiness of the world—the laboratory, the battlefield or the market—into usable, mobile knowledge. The ultimate goal …