Just a quick post that might seem a little too “insider baseball” for many of our readers, but Karl Bakeman, W. W. Norton’s sociology editor, has brought another online gem to our attention: OrgTheory’s post “One way of specifying the agency problematic.” Here’s a sample from the welcome return of Omar!

The lesson? Agency means many things. One obvious thing that it means is freedom. Yet, a curious quirk in the history of social theory linked “freedom” to cognition or thought (Kant)… [S]ocial-construction types of debates are so predictable: on the one side you usually have somebody vigorously stomping his/her feet and saying that there are objective features of the world (e.g. and by “objective” the foot-stomper means features of reality that demand that they be conceptualized in ways that leave no freedom for alternative construals). Let’s call these features non-negotiable features. On the other side you have social constructionists carefully denying that such non-negotiable features exist (or more precisely, claiming that they might exist in a neutral ontological sense but they don’t really constrain thought in the way that the non-constructionist claims that they do; i.e. they are epistemically indeterminate). For the (strict) social constructionist everything that the non-constructionist claims is non-negotiable could be construed otherwise, and that’s why culture is autonomous and people have agency.

Heady stuff, to be sure, but I’d encourage those with the interest to dive on in. Be sure to check out the comments section!