From Plural to Institutional Agency

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Methodological Individualism ◽  
Strong Form ◽  
Multiple Agents ◽  
Group Agency ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Institutional Agency ◽  
Reductive Account

Can institutional agency be understood in terms of informal (plural) group agency? This book argues that the answer is ‘yes’, and more specifically that both can be understood ultimately in terms of the agency of individuals who are members of such groups and in terms of the concepts already at play in our understanding of individual agency. Thus, the book argues for a strong form of methodological individualism. It is the second part of a two-part project that extends the multiple agents account of plural agency in From Individual to Plural Agency (OUP 2016) to institutional agency. It argues that the key to understanding institutional agency is recognizing that the time-indexed institutional membership relation is socially constructed in the sense that it is a special type of status function, a status role, which is accepted by the agent who fills the role. The book analyzes constitutive rules in terms of essentially intentional patterns of collective action and status functions in terms of constitutive rules and conventions. It analyzes institutions as structures of interrelated status roles that can be successively occupied by different agents, and provides a reductive account of institutional action in terms of these roles and the notion of proxy agency, in which one agent or group acts through another who is authorized to act for them. The account is applied to both corporations and nation states.

The Division of Labor and Proxy Agency

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Multiple Agents ◽  
Institutional Action ◽  
Institutional Agency ◽  
The Right ◽  
Proxy Agent ◽  
Right Intention

Chapter 13 first lays out the problem of proxy agency. An example of a proxy agent is a spokesperson for an organization. When the spokesperson, appropriately authorized, in the right conditions, with the right intention and message, speaks, we count the group as announcing something. Thus, it appears that the group does something but only one of its members acts. Proxy agency appears then to be inconsistent with the multiple agents analysis of collective action. Chapter 13 provides an account of proxy agency, focusing on the case of a spokesperson, that draws on the notion of a status function and constitutive agency to show it can be compatible with the multiple agents account of institutional action. Then it clarifies and extends the account by defending it against objections. Finally, it discusses the systematic use of the same terms in different senses in relation to individual and institutional agency.

Summary and Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Group Action ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Multiple Agents ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Collective Acceptance ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
Group Agents

This chapter summarizes in broad terms the work of the book, which focuses on how the multiple agents account of collective action can be extended to institutional and mob action. It reviews the problems raised by singular group agents. It reviews the account of logical form developed for grammatically singular group action sentences. It reviews the account of constitutive rules and constitutive agency. It reviews the analysis of status functions, collective acceptance, and conventions. It reviews the account of membership in singular group agents. It reviews the account of proxy agency. It reviews the application to corporations and nation states. It concludes with a big picture view of the territory and brief description of directions for future research.

7. Power and accountability in environmental law

2017 ◽  
pp. 81-94
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Judicial Review ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Collective Action Problem ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Good Government ◽  
Scientific Expertise

Nation states dominate environmental law because of the need for a comprehensive exercise of authority in response to a collective action problem within any particular jurisdiction. ‘Power and accountability in environmental law’ explains that what makes the exercise of state power legitimate is that it is employed in accordance with established principles of good government—principles nearly always embodied in law. However, behind many environmental debates and disagreements are disagreements about the power of the state. The different administrative institutions of environmental law are described as well as how scientific expertise is fundamental to environmental law. The judicial review process is also outlined.

scholarly journals Spitting in the Salad: Minor Rebellion as Institutional Agency

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liisa Välikangas ◽  
Arne Carlsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Asset Management ◽  
Hedge Fund ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Major Field ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
Social Inquiry ◽  
Institutional Agency ◽  
Cultural Frames

How can a desire for rebellion drive institutional agency, and how is such desire produced? In this paper, we develop a theory of minor rebellion as a form of institutional agency. Drawing from the work of Deleuze and Guattari as well as from notions of social inquiry and the sociology of punk, we qualify and illustrate minor rebellion as a lived-in field of desire and engagement that involves deterritorializing of practice in the institutional field. Three sets of processes are involved: (i) minor world-making, through establishing the aesthetics and relations of an outsider social network within a major field, including the enactment of cultural frames of revolt and radicalism; (ii) minor creating, through constructing and experimenting with terms, concepts, and technology that somehow challenge hegemony from within; and (iii) minor inquiring, through problematizing social purposes and the related experiential surfacing of the desirable new. Minor rebellion suggests a new solution to the paradox of embedded agency by describing institutional agency as shuttling between political contest and open-ended social inquiry, involving anti-sentiments, but also being for something. The paper also contributes to recasting institutional agency as a process resulting from emergent collective action rather than preceding it. To illustrate our theorizing, we describe the emergence of Robin Hood Asset Management, a Finnish activist hedge fund. At the end of the paper we discuss how minor rebellion raises new questions about the multiplicities and eventness of desiring in institutional agency.

Deportation and Immigration Enforcement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Brotherton ◽  
Sarah Tosh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Immigration Legislation ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Era

While deportation as a practice has roots that reach far back into history, the state’s removal of immigrants in the modern era is unprecedented, in terms of both its mechanisms and its breadth. Over the past few decades, the United States in particular has developed systems of immigrant enforcement, detention, and deportation that serve to restrain and remove hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year. In the late 20th century, along with a punitive turn in criminal justice and drug policy, came an era of punitive immigration legislation in the United States, culminating in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996. Among other laws, IIRIRA laid the groundwork for astronomical rates of deportation in the early 21st century—rates the current administration vows to exceed in coming years. The increasingly criminalized immigration policy of the United States has been paralleled in many ways in immigrant-receiving countries around the world, resulting in a “global deportation regime” that transcends national borders. Theories that frame deportation as a necessary product and constitutive practice of social membership in our modern system of sovereign nation states are supplemented by those that view it as a tool used by neoliberal governments to control a vulnerable surplus population of immigrant workers. Another theoretical thread on deportation focuses on the culture of vindictiveness in late modernity, and the social bulimia of contemporary societies that simultaneously integrate and exclude the immigrant Other. Theories of subcultural resistance are also relevant for attempts to understand individual agency and collective mobilization, both of immigrants against deportation, as well as deportees against stigmatization. Post-deportation studies focus on the deportee experience, with a focus on social displacement/exclusion and stigmatization.

The Apparent Autonomy of Singular Group Agents

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Ludwig
Keyword(s):  
Group Action ◽  
Multiple Agents ◽  
Membership Relation ◽  
Group Agents ◽  
Reductive Account

Chapter 5 shows how to extend the multiple agents account of plural agency to the case of grammatically singular group action sentences in a way that explains some of the features of singular group action sentences that were identified in Chapter 3 as suggesting that a reductive account was implausible. First, it shows how to integrate the time indexed membership relation into the account. Second, it explains how this enables us to understand singular group action sentences in which it appears that such groups do things through changes in their membership in a way that only appeals to the agents who are members of it at any given time. Third, it shows that the fact that it appears that singular group agents could have had different members than they do is just a matter of their being picked out via descriptions which could have had different denotations.

scholarly journals The social construction of refugees & asylum-seekers: a case study of South Africa.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Anne McDonough McDonough
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
South African ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Social

Refugees/asylum-seekers are socially constructed as being economically, politically and culturally threatening to the nation-state in which they seek asylum. Evidence of this social construction can be found in media, statements by public officials and in opinion polls. By synthesizing the results of research we can identify the commonalities amongst discourses from different nation-states. This allows us to see how refugees/asylum- eekers serve nation building in general. A case study of South Africa is used to show how this discourse relates to the South African nation-building exercise, with particular references to the xenophobic violence of May 2008. What emerges from the case study is that despite evidence that this framework is a good fit for thinking critically about instances of xenophobia in South Africa, there is also evidence of a counter discourse about refugees/asylum-seekers that casts them as deserving of compassion and generosity.

Group Action and Social Ontology

1988 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Ware
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Group Action ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Methodological Individualism ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Distant Future ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Social Entities

AbstractIn recent years there has been an interesting turn in the philosophical literature to groups and collective action. At the same time there has been a renewed interest in various forms of methodological individualism. This paper attempts to show the diversity of group action that is overlooked by much of the literature, to clarify some of the ambiguities that plague our language about groups and collectives, and to support the view that social entities are genuine. Some important arguments against social entities being genuine are rebutted. The existence of social entities gives some substance to the debate about methodological individualism, but the resolution of the debate has depended too much on empirical results in the distant future. The article ends with some suggestions on how the debate matters in looking for biases in the directions of current social theorizing.

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