Topic
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.
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Book•
01 Jan 1996
TL;DR: In this article, the Dialectics of Discourse are used to describe the relationship between social and environmental change, and a Cautionary Tale on Internal Relations is presented. But it does not address the effect of environmental change on social relations.
Abstract: Thoughts for a Prologue. Introduction. Part I: Orientations. 1. Militant Particularism and Global Ambition. 2. Dialectics. 3. A Cautionary Tale on Internal Relations. 4. The Dialectics of Discourse. 5. Historical Agency and the Loci of Social Change. Part II: The Nature of Environment. Prologue. 6. The Domination of Nature and its Discontents. 7. Valuing Nature. 8. The Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change. Part III: Space, Time and Place. Prologue. 9. The Social Construction of Space and Time. 10. The Currency of Space-Time. 11. From Space to Place and Back Again. Part IV: Justice, Difference and Politics. Prologue. 12. Class Relations, Social Justice and the Political Geography of Difference. 13. The Environment of Justice. 14. Possible Urban Worlds. Thoughts for an Epilogue. Bibliography. Index.
3,220 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1999
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an overview of the history of the field of molecular biology, including the origins of the two-tier structure of a two-tiered laboratory.
Abstract: A Note on Transcription 1. Introduction 1.1. The Disunity of the Sciences 1.2. The Cultures of Knowledge Societies 1.3. Culture and Practice 1.4. The Structure of the Book 1.5. Physics Theory, and a First Look at the Field 1.6. Issues of Methodology, and More about the Field 2. What is a Laboratory? 2.1. Laboratories as Reconfigurations of Natural and Social Orders 2.2. From Laboratory to Experiment 2.3. Some Features of the Laboratory Reconsidered 3. Particle Physics and Negative Knowledge 3.1. The Analogy of the Closed Universe 3.2. A World of Signs and Secondary Appearances 3.3. The"Meaninglessness" of Measurement 3.4. The Structure of the Care of the Self 3.5. Negative Knowledge and the Liminal Approach 3.6. Moving in a Closed Universe: Unfolding, Framing, and Convoluting 4. Molecular Biology and Blind Variation 4.1. An Object-Oriented Epistemics 4.2. The Small-Science Style of Molecular Biology and the Genome Project 4.3. The Laboratory as a Two-Tier Structure 4.4."Blind" Variation and Natural Selection 4.5. The Experiential Register 4.6. Blind Variation Reconsidered 5. From Machines to Organisms: Detectors as Behavioral and Social Beings 5.1. Primitive Classifications 5.2. Detector Agency and Physiology 5.3. Detectors as Moral and Social Individuals 5.4. Live Organism or Machine? 5.5. Are There Enemies? 5.6. Physicists as Symbionts 5.7. Taxonomies of Trust 5.8. Primitive Classifications Reconsidered 6. From Organisms to Machines: Laboratories as Factories of Transgenics 6.1. A Science of Life without Nature? 6.2. Organisms as Production Sites 6.3. Cellular Machines 6.4. Industrial Production versus Natural (Re)production 6.5. Biological Machines Reconsidered 7. HEP Experiments as Post-Traditional Communitarian Structures 7.1.. Large Collaborations: A Brief History 7.2. The Erasure of the Individual as an Epistemic Subject 7.3. Management by Content 7.4. The Intersection of Management by Content and Communitarianism 7.5. Communitarian Time: Genealogical, Scheduled 8. The Multiple Ordering Frameworks of HEP Collaborations 8.1. The Birth Drama of an Experiment 8.2. Delaying the Choice, or Contests of Unfolding 8.3. Confidence Pathways and Gossip Circles 8.4. Other Ordering Frameworks 8.5. Reconfiguration Reconsidered 9. The Dual Organization of Molecular Biology Laboratories 9.1. Laboratories Structured as Individuated Units 9.2. Becoming a Laboratory Leader 9.3. The Two Levels of the Laboratory 9.4. The"Impossibility" of Cooperation in Molecular Biology 10. Toward an Understanding of Knowledge Societies: A Dialogue Notes References Index
2,860 citations
TL;DR: The Morphogenetic Cycle: the basis of the morphogenetic approach 7. Structural and cultural conditioning 8. The morphogenesis of agency 9. Social elaboration.
Abstract: Building on her seminal contribution to social theory in Culture and Agency, in this 1995 book Margaret Archer develops her morphogenetic approach, applying it to the problem of structure and agency. Since structure and agency constitute different levels of stratified social reality, each possesses distinctive emergent properties which are real and causally efficacious but irreducible to one another. The problem, therefore, is shown to be how to link the two rather than conflate them, as has been common theoretical practice. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach not only rejects methodological individualism and holism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one, between elisionary theorising and emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world. The morphogenetic approach is the sociological complement of transcendental realism, and together they provide a basis for non-conflationary theorizing which is also of direct utility to the practising social analyst.
2,843 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study identity, collective memory, social classification, and logics of action in the context of culture and its connections to identity and collective memory in cognitive psychology and social cognition.
Abstract: Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supraindividual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information and as schematic structures that organize that information. Culture carried by institutions, networks, and social movements diffuses, activates, and selects among available schemata. Implications for the study of identity, collective memory, social classification, and logics of action are developed.
2,543 citations
01 Aug 1992
TL;DR: The actor-network theory as discussed by the authors is a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social.
Abstract: This paper describes the theory of the actor-network, a body of theoretical and empirical writing which treats social relations, including power and organization, as network effects. The theory is distinctive because it insists that networks are materially heterogeneous and argues that society and organization would not exist if they were simply social. Agents, texts, devices, architectures are all generated in, form part of, and are essential to, the networks of the social. And in the first instance, all should be analyzed in the same terms. Accordingly, in this view, the task of sociology is to characterize the ways in which materials join together to generate themselves and reproduce institutional and organizational patterns in the networks of the social.
2,439 citations