Agency without Actors?: New Approaches to Collective Action

by Passoth; Jan-Hendrik

• ISBN13: 9780415603423
• ISBN10: 0415603420
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-03
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Agency without Actors? New Approaches to collective Action ãis rethinking a key issue in social theory and research: the question of agency. The history of sociological thought is deeply intertwined with the discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations. In most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact. Consequently the book asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in what different ways?The volume offers a critical state-of-the-art debate of internationally and nationally leading scholars within Sociology, Social Anthropology and STS on agency (Latour, Law, Michael, Rammert etc.). It fosters the productive exchange of empirical settings and theoretical views by outlining a wide range of novel accounts that link human and non-human agency. It tries to understand social-technical, political and environmental networks as different forms of agency that produce discrete and identifiable entities like humans, animals, technical artifacts. It also asks how different types of (often conflicting) agency and agents actors are distinguished in practice, how they are maintained and how they interfere with each other.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Events, suggestions, accounts	p. 13
Suggestion and satisfaction. On the actual occasion of agency	p. 15
Science, cosmopolitics and the question of agency Kant's critique and Stengers' event	p. 31
Questioning the human/non-human distinction	p. 54
Agency and "worlds" of accounts. Erasing the trace or rephrasing the action?	p. 61
Contribution, distribution, failures	p. 87
Distributed agency and advanced technology. Or: how to analyze constellations of collective inter-agency	p. 89
Distributed sleeping and breathing. On the agency of means in medical work	p. 113
Agencies' democracy. "Contribution" as a paradigm to (re)thinking the common in a world of conflict	p. 130
Reality failures	p. 146
Interaction, partnership, organization	p. 161
"What's the story?" Organizing as a mode of existence	p. 163
Researching water quality with non-humans. An ANT account	p. 178
Horses - significant others, people's companions, and subtle actors	p. 196
Index	p. 212
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