Agency as a Process of Translation

An (Other) View of Agency

The concept of agency, with its roots in ancient servant-master relations and its focus on the state of acting to achieve an end, is “influenced by Western conceptions of the actor” (Hitlin & Elder, 2007, p. 170)—someone who acts in social and organizational settings. This agent’s voice, often responsible for the historical recording of societies and organizations, is pervasive, making it difficult to identify the voice of the agent’s “other.” Indeed, the English language contains no antonyms for the words “agency” and “agent.” The only identifiable corresponding term is the word “patient,” someone who is passive and considered to lack agency. But do these “others” really lack agency?

Grammatically, agents are actors who have volition, can perceive, are able to move, or bring about change (Dowty, 1991). So, at least linguistically, it is possible for a co-agent to exist. However, in the English active tense particularly (as encouraged in North American scholarship), as soon as a co-agent becomes the direct object of a sentence (i.e., someone who or something that is acted on), he, she, or it is translated into a passive, receptive “other.” For example, in the sentence, “His energy surprised everyone,” “everyone” becomes the seemingly passive recipient of “his energy” (the agent). Thus, language delimits our understanding of agency and of what it means to be an agent.

As Bignall (2010) asserts, it is ontology that shapes agency. Asking ontologically oriented questions of agency can open up alternative conceptualizations and correspondingly appropriate epistemological engagements. But how can we recognize, know, and describe agency in its diversity? Postcolonial historians, for example, highlight the agency of those acted upon during the colonial era, in sharp contrast to the agency of colonial rulers in more mainstream renditions of history. These alternative histories, called subaltern histories, have been recorded and described through the voices of socially and politically oppressed people in colonial times, such as peasants and workers (see Guha, 1993; Guha & Spivak, 1988). Subalterns, as “othered” agents, provide meaningful historical counterpoints by offering different accounts of times, places, agents, and agency, showing that agents, forms of agency, and action can exist in relational and collective tension across time and space.

One way of opening up conceptualizations of agency is by understanding agency as a process of translation. This process, dedicated to the creation of new meaning in hybrid contexts, such as multilingual, multicultural, or multi-perspectival spaces, also referred to as “borderlands,” “expresses a sense of doing something other or more than merely telling, of communicative and perhaps creative exchange rather than dissemination” (Freeman, 2009, p. 441). Translation is, as Freeman (2009) says, “an invitation to negotiation” (p. 442) and a way to reflect not only on what we do, but also on what our words and actions mean to others in a variety of contexts. In other words, agency shows up in translation when individuals and social collectives cross discursive boundaries (Homi Bhabha, cited in Mitchell, 1995).

Using Postcolonial Ethnography to Study Agency as a Translation Process

How, then, can scholars empirically engage with reconfigurations of agency and agents at these points of translation? How can moments of translation reveal larger cultural and moral logics that govern individual and institutional forms of agency in particular contexts? Or, following the postcolonial anthropologist Anna Tsing (1997), how might the logics and the sites of cultural formation be identified and translated in ways that do not reify cultural difference but rather reveal diverse forms of agency?

To answer these questions, we draw on postcolonial ethnographic practices grounded in commitments to accountability, context, truthfulness, and community (Gonzalez, 2003). These ethical and political commitments position researchers and the people we study as collaborative co-constructors and interpreters of accounts of agency—how all participants (including researchers) come to know and perform agency, the challenge of being involved in this knowledge and performance, and phenomena they close themselves from to disrupt or delay its performance. Agency, as communicated in such accounts, is politically, socially, environmentally, physically, and emotionally contextualized. It possesses a particular specificity and situationality (Cruz, 2014). This specificity and situationality is grounded in the ways all participants work together to speak truthfully about experiences of agency that are not visible on the surface, as well as the contexts in which agency can become limited by others. Such limits to expressions of agency exist within all communities. Thus, capturing when, where, and how all participants as agents choose to share accounts to learn about, as well as support individuals, relationships, and organizations is central to respecting and reflecting on the multifaceted experiences of agency in specific communities.

At a collective or organizational level, putting public transcripts of agency in conversation with hidden, private transcripts of agency can accentuate how objections/resistance to being acted upon is also agentic (Scott, 1990). Moving beyond a fixed period of time and paying attention to discursive “surges” (Barley & Kunda, 1992, p. 365) and challenges over time reveals how agency is translated in diverse ways through different agents. It also illuminates the bounded and unbounded nature of, and struggle over, the accomplishment of agency (see Mumby, 1997). Barley and Kunda (1992) use this approach to investigate rational and normative ideologies of control in managerial discourse, tracking data from the 1870s to the present.

These kinds of longitudinal approaches can provide insight into the ways social collectives, be they organizations or communities, seek to manage incommensurate ideas about agency as they are grounded in a wider cultural milieu (Barley & Kunda, 1992). As Cassaniti (2012) discovers in her examinations of agency in Northern Thailand, Christian community members viewed personal agency as emerging from the belief in, and construction of, a cosmologically external other. Buddhist community members, however, described agency as constructed through a cosmologically natural self that did not necessitate belief. Thus, remaining open and sensitive to diverse and contrasting understandings and conceptualizations of agency as they exist in different communities reveals complex relationships between self, agency and culture. For example, in her exploration of Muslim women’s “freedom practices,” Vintges (2012) discusses how these women engage topics such as self-presentation, women’s empowerment, and a reinterpretation of Islamic heritage on a talk show featuring four hostesses from different Middle Eastern countries. Her work demonstrates how diverse accounts of agency in discussions on the freedom of Muslim women in the media can establish cross-cultural feminist strategies in their discussions of such topics to counter dominant stereotypical images. In both these examples, resisting interpretive foreclosure, or remaining sensitive to the presence of multiple voices and perspectives, is necessary for radically opening up conversations around agency in a dynamically evolving world.

Moving Forward

A postcolonial perspective on agency, focusing on processes of translation where new meanings are created in hybrid spaces, asks organizational communication scholars to question “why conditions are what they are and how they can be undone and redone” (Shome & Hegde, 2002, p. 250). How scholars conceptualize and empirically study agency affects how phenomena are described and expressed. Remaining theoretically and empirically sensitive to translation processes can uncover alternative, diverse, other, multifaceted forms of agency as shown in the examples we have presented in this essay. If these examples do not fit the “typical” organizational communication mold, it is because such examples are unavailable, or at least very hard to find. This does not mean we cannot or should not look at other disciplines for inspiration. The work of scholars such as Cassaniti and Vintges illustrates that questioning dominant ontological and epistemological understandings as well as linguistic expressions of agency can open up a richer, more complex understanding of agency, organizing, and ourselves. How is agency conceptualized in this context? How is it exercised and limited by others—who are agents, too? What different forms of agency exist here? Answers to such questions can yield “creative contingencies for theory building” regarding agency and its individual and collective performance (Tsing, 1997, p. 253).

Finally, alternative linguistic expressions, including new grammatical constructions, are also much needed, if we are to argue that agency is always possible, in any context, as long as volition exists. How can we represent all agents without relegating one or more of them to the position of patient or object? How can we capture agency and agents in all their diversity? In 1988, Spivak asked, “Can the subaltern speak?” Perhaps the time has come for postcolonial organizational communication scholars to ask, “In what contexts and under what circumstances can the subaltern speak, and how can we be best prepared to recognize this voice?”