Abstract
As a leadership scholar and a discourse scholar, who also studies paradox, I cannot remember a time when I haven’t had to balance competing views of agency—under-theorized, exaggerated, subjugated, hybridized, and even perverted. So it is with this complicated mindset that I eagerly approached the reading of Boris Brummans’ edited volume, The Agency of Organizing: Perspectives and Case Studies.
The preface by Linda Putnam provides an excellent lead-in by articulating the various tensions around which the book’s chapters navigate—action-structure, as one might expect, but also individual-collective, control-resistance, and human-nonhuman. The chapters, she argues, heuristically disrupt these dualisms by creating liminal spaces in which to view new possibilities. The book very much delivers on this score.
In the introductory chapter, Brummans creates a framework for the examination of agency across the chapters, which gives added nuance and depth to the individual explanations provided by the book’s contributors. Moreover, it is clear that as an editor he pushed them to draw distinctions between their own perspectives and that of others. The book is at its best when this is executed properly because it feels like there’s a conversation going on among the authors, which is rare for an edited book to achieve. The book also maintains a consistent chapter formatting of theoretical depictions of agency followed by strong, extended research exemplars. These depictions mirror similar trends in this journal with respect to the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO), the material turn in organization studies, and nonhuman agency (e.g., Boxenbaum, Jones, Meyer, & Svejenova, 2018; Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Cooren, 2011). Indeed, the majority of the contributors to this volume can be considered CCO scholars whose goal is to understand the means by which organizations are made present in and through communicative acts. That said, not all CCO scholars endorse nonhuman agency, and that variance is usefully reflected throughout this book.
Steffen Blaschke’s chapter on agency provides a particularly lucid depiction of Luhmannian systems theory. However, the empirical example, while illustrative of Niklas Luhmann’s thought-provoking view of agency based in organizational decision-making and not individuals, feels like a view from 30,000 feet with its pictures of diverging network configurations over time. The longitudinality (16 years) and mathematical derivations in the case study will appeal to some, but for others, like me, it will feel quite removed from the more performative aspects of agency featured throughout the rest of the book.
The chapter by Joel Iverson, Robert McPhee, and Cade Spaulding continues the conversation with the view of agency from Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and McPhee and colleagues’ related Four Flows Model. Dedicated to exploring how organizations are communicatively constituted, the model focuses on organizational membership negotiation, reflexive self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning. In this context, the chapter provides a robust defense of agency as residing in human beings, based in the capacity to make a difference, the level of knowledgeability required of them, and the reflexive monitoring of their performance. The examples they provide in the research exemplar wonderfully illustrate the reflexive capacity of human actors—and why they consider nonhuman agents to be resources for human actors, contra the new materialists of the other chapters who decenter the human actors. If one is averse to the hybridizing bandwagon, this is the chapter to read.
The chapter on structurational convergence and divergence by Anne Nicotera attempts to explain agency in the context of incompatible structures, vicious cycles, and intractable conflict. It is grounded partly in structuration theory, but also in dynamic equilibrium models within the paradox literature (Smith & Lewis, 2011). Perhaps because Nicotera’s perspective is still relatively new, it feels the least well developed and a bit derivative of Smith and Lewis. Readers of the many paradox studies in this journal will be struck by the parallel between Nicotera’s “meaningful agency” and paradoxical thinking as the solution to virtuous over vicious cycles (e.g., Bednarek, Paroutis, & Sillince, 2017; Hargrave & Van de Ven, 2017; Keller, Loewenstein, & Yan, 2017). The problem with such a universal endorsement is that paradoxical thinking is not always optimal, and it ignores the agency in dynamic disequilibrium (Sheep, Fairhurst, & Khazanchi, 2017).
The chapter by Dennis Mumby argues that those with an interest in studying organizational communication should not only be studying what has come to be known as the communicative constitution of organization (CCO), but the communicative organization of capitalist production (COCP). The focus here is on the agency of entrepreneurial selves and brands in today’s new media environments, in which for-profit organizations’ central function is to make meaning and manage identities through brand strategy. He writes about the constrained agency of “communicative capitalism,” rooted in Foucault’s notion of governmentality and the choice of autonomous individuals to conform to principles of the market. It is a fascinating chapter, but the agency contrast between CCO and COCP could be more sharply drawn.
Kirsten Broadfoot, Debashish Munshi, and Joëlle Cruz’s chapter on postcolonialism strips agency of all its trappings in dominant hierarchies and systems of knowledge. Instead, they re-conceptualize it as a moment-to-moment process of negotiation and translation between larger societal or institutional discourses and the localized narratives of culturally produced subjects in situ, i.e., in social interaction. Translational processes place a premium on issues of language as the very means by which meanings are transformed in hybrid contexts such as multilingual or multicultural spaces. The postcolonial project thus represents a systematic overhaul of agency from every possible perspective, including that of the narrator whose privileging excludes the agency of Othered voices. This is a provocative chapter, especially given its methodological relevance to all systematic investigations of agency.
François Cooren’s chapter conceptualizes agency in a very different way. It is perhaps his clearest explanation yet on agency—not just of the hybrid agency of nonhuman and humans, which is already well published under the CCO banner (e.g., Cooren et al., 2011), but his clarification of the differences that he accords to each, which he and his colleagues typically relegate to the background. Cooren takes one of Giddens’ definitions of agency, the capacity to make a difference, and makes the strong (and self-evident) case that nonhumans also fit this bill, arguing that it is always an empirical and practical question to make these plain. He thus emphasizes the autonomous, yet relational character of all forms of agency, in which agency is a matter of acting for, with, and through a variety of “beings and things.” More controversially, these include emotions, ideas, and routines, as well as objects, spaces, and bodies, as the very means by which organizations are made present.
Karen Ashcraft and Timothy Kuhn’s chapter continues the relational turn toward a hybridized agency between humans and nonhumans, but emphasizes the distinction between humans and nonhumans as an enacted effect rather than a given. They draw from Michel Callon’s conception of performativity in actor-network theory to focus on the need to understand particular configurations or arrangements of hybridized agents. However, they use Judith Butler to argue for the need to understand the political value of particular configurations. Using affect theory, they deepen their orientation to the performativity of agency by locating it in that felt sense of energy or stream of sensations that various socio-material configurations animate. Like Cooren, they decenter the human and locate agency in ever-evolving circuits, networks, and connections whose embodiment and embeddedness are sine qua non. Suffice it to say that the methodological issues of such a stance are not insignificant.
Finally, the chapter by George Cheney and Dean Ritz ties the various conceptions of agency in a rather novel way. In addition to the usual thematic analysis that describes and differentiates among the perspectives, there is a particularly strong discussion of five global problem areas that provide the warrant for the evolution and variety of ways that conceptions of agency are now developing in organizational contexts. These include the law and ethics; human rights; globalization scripts; democracies in crisis; and the environment itself. There are also some brief but provocative arguments around the ways in which discourse and discursive formations have been both helpful and a hindrance with respect to how we understand communication and agency in organizational contexts.
After reading this text, I came away impressed with the treatment of agency in its all of its performative, material, constrained, individual, and collective aspects. Although the contributors are all organizational communication scholars, any organizational scientist interested in pushing the boundaries of what agency means for organizations and its members should find this book to be a valuable resource.