{"id":537,"date":"2011-12-08T13:37:18","date_gmt":"2011-12-08T18:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=537"},"modified":"2011-12-28T12:45:25","modified_gmt":"2011-12-28T17:45:25","slug":"an-aside-orgtheory-and-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2011\/12\/08\/an-aside-orgtheory-and-agency\/","title":{"rendered":"An Aside: OrgTheory and Agency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick post that might seem a little too &#8220;insider baseball&#8221; for many of our readers, but Karl Bakeman, W. W. Norton&#8217;s sociology editor, has brought another online gem to our attention: OrgTheory&#8217;s post &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/orgtheory.wordpress.com\/2011\/12\/07\/one-way-of-specifying-the-agency-problematic\/\">One way of specifying the agency\u00a0problematic<\/a>.&#8221; Here&#8217;s a sample from the welcome return of Omar!<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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 \u201cfreedom\u201d to cognition or thought (Kant)&#8230; [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 \u201cobjective\u201d the foot-stomper means features of reality that demand that they be conceptualized in ways that leave no freedom for alternative construals). Let\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s why culture is autonomous and people have agency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Heady stuff, to be sure, but I&#8217;d encourage those with the interest to dive on in. Be sure to check out the comments section!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick post that might seem a little too &#8220;insider baseball&#8221; for many of our readers, but Karl Bakeman, W. W. Norton&#8217;s sociology editor, has brought another online gem to our attention: OrgTheory&#8217;s post &#8220;One way of specifying the agency\u00a0problematic.&#8221; Here&#8217;s a sample from the welcome return of Omar! The lesson? Agency means many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2269],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-agency","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}