Abstract
This volume, and other books like it, is evidence that the bewilderment continues.
The bewilderment continues. Or rather, the bewilderment surrounding the nuances of agency in organizational theorizing is acknowledged and embraced in this edited volume. This book does not seek to unequivocally resolve the question of agency in organizational studies and never claims to take up this task. Instead, this book offers explicit discussion of agency across prominent paradigms in organizational communication theorizing. Agency, broadly speaking, encompasses questions regarding the capacity for action and making a difference. As the title suggests, The Agency of Organizing highlights agency as a central concept for understanding organizations and how they function. For audiences familiar with organizational communication scholarship, this book offers clarity in the various definitions and uses of agency across organizational perspectives, presented by heavy-hitters in organizational communication, specifically from communication as constitutive of organizations (CCO) perspectives. For audience’s who are less familiar with these theoretical perspectives or constitutive organizational communication scholarship more broadly, these chapters offer a taste of organizational communication theories through tangible case studies, with a focus on defining agency as a central element of organizing.
Although central, agency, as it is used in organizational communication scholarship, also carries a multitude of meanings and emphases. These different uses of agency further implicate entire intellectual perspectives and ontologies, though these implications are rarely readily distinguished. This ambiguity can end up being confusing, perplexing, and even downright infuriating for students and scholars seeking to understand and apply agency in research. This volume explicitly addresses these assumptions and their associations across paradigms.
In the introductory chapter, Brummans “presents the main theoretical perspectives on agency in organizational scholarship” (p. 2) by providing a brief overview of theoretical perspectives covered throughout the following chapters, including agency theory, neo-institutional theory, systems theory, critical, feminist, and postcolonial theories, as well as theories of hybridity, sociomaterial entanglement, and process. These brief summaries cover a broad swath of organizational theory in about 15 pages, focusing specifically on the implicit and explicit considerations of agency across paradigms. Due to the number of theories represented, this introduction presumes at least some familiarity with the perspectives discussed by providing only a cursory definition before delving into the specifics of agency. The chapters that follow take up some of these perspectives elaborating the use of agency in empirical case studies with particular emphasis from CCO scholarship.
In Chapter 2, Blashke demonstrates a Luhmannian perspective (one school of CCO scholarship) toward agency through the use of a social systems approach to a longitudinal study of ICANN, a nonprofit organization. This approach treats agency as distributed and decentralized, instead highlighting a node and network-level of organizational decision-making. Blashke’s chapter offers the only quantitative approach to the study of agency, with the remaining chapters in the volume employing a variety of qualitative methodologies.
Chapters 3 and 4 both apply structurational perspectives framed through different theoretical approaches. Iverson, McPhee, and Spaulding take a structurational perspective (Giddens, 1986) in Chapter 3, considering the role of agency in McPhee and Zaug’s (2000) “Four Flows Model of CCO.” In a case study of 2-1-1, another US nonprofit organization, the authors highlight agency in the application of the Four Flows, addressing membership negotiation, reflexive self-structuring, activity coordination, and institutional positioning as the essential elements for a social system to be an organization. In Chapter 4, Nicotera also adopts a structurational approach, specifically drawing on structurational divergence theory (SDT) as a framework to study agency empirically in organizational contexts. Using exemplars of structurational divergence (SD) in nursing, Nicotera notes how viewing SD in terms of agency loss can be useful to develop interventions to prevent cycles of conflict that result from SD. Although each of these chapters adopt a structurational perspective, each chapter demonstrates the capacity for the concept of agency to inform different organizational questions and frames.
Chapters 5 and 6 offer critical and postcolonioal perspectives on agency, respectively. In Chapter 5, Mumby discusses agency as it relates to communicative capitalism and branding through the case study of Alex from Target. Mumby uses agency to frame a critical approach to branding, acknowledging the agential power of brands in shaping meaning in social life. Mumby’s chapter also raises critical questions regarding the role of intention in the theorizing of agency. In Chapter 6, Broadfoot, Munshi, and Cruz explore the concept of agency from a postcolonial perspective, questioning agency as a typically Western concept and broadening the possibilities of agency. For the authors in Chapter 6, agency is a process of translation, “where meaning is created and transformed in hybrid spaces, crafting a fresh range of metaphors and language in organizational settings that emerge from a deep engagement with intersections and contestations between a variety of cultures, nations, and locales” (p. 138). This chapter encourages reflexivity toward theorizing agency and flips the script on predominantly Western notions of agency.
Chapters 7 and 8 both adopt relational perspectives regarding agency. A relational ontology here posits viewing relations as the site of constitution of organizational phenomena such as agency, thus agency must always be seen as relative (Kuhn et al., 2017). In Chapter 7, Cooren adopts this relational ontology to extend a Piercian conceptualization of agency in a case study of Médecins Sans Frontières. Cooren highlights the capacity for agency to extend beyond human actors, acknowledging different forms of agency that make a difference in the world. In Chapter 8, Ashcraft and Kuhn also apply a relational ontology with particular focus on sociomateriality, adopting Callon’s concept of agencement as well as affect theory to challenge common frames for understanding North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (HB2) and the resulting bathroom controversy. These chapters remove the human from the center of our understanding of agency, instead situating the human within an ongoing web of relations and recognizing the capacity for action beyond human beings.
To conclude, Cheney and Ritz offer their thoughts on agency in organizational scholarship more broadly, identifying the importance of agency in questions of law and ethics, human rights, democracy in crisis, and globalization. The authors also provide their own commentary on the chapters included in this volume as each chapter pertains to seven dimensions of agency: (1) grantors and grantees; (2) human beings, personhood, and transcendent institutions; (3) network (re)-distribution of agency; (4) intention and intentionality; (5) identities, roles, and relationships; (6) power and effect; and (7) process. This culminating chapter identifies the similarities across the perspectives introduced as well as points of departure. Most importantly, this chapter raises questions about agency and communication scholarship moving forward.
The theories represented in this volume put communication at the center of organization and organizing. For those interested in the potential of this kind of communicative approach for extending organizational understanding, this book helps distinguish the subtleties between these tightly related approaches within a constitutive paradigm. Due to these theoretical complexities, the necessity of explaining the fundamental commitments in this scholarship does, at times, still bury the role of agency within a given approach—losing the forest for the trees. Yet, the authors still manage the collective accomplishment of elaborating on agency’s contributions to organizational research and raising questions for research moving forward.
Ultimately, this volume identifies agency as crucial and often under explicated organizational phenomenon. For management and organizational scholars, this is a useful collection of literature and approaches to view side-by-side with explicit focus on the role of agency in organizing. However, these chapters are far from comprehensive representations of the nuances of agency within each of these theoretical frames. Instead, these chapters often offer a taste of research published elsewhere in organizational communication journals. As such, this collection represents existing arguments and uses of agency in organizational communication theory. Still this book serves as a valuable resource for forwarding the theorizing of agency primarily through the critical reflection on agency’s role in the study of organizations. Each chapter offers its own definition and application of agency to organizational questions, establishing multiple paths forward for the development of organizational theory. Therefore, though the bewilderment continues, though there are still a multitude of meanings with regards to agency, this volume succeeds in alleviating a key frustration in organizational communication research and fostering organizational exploration with an eye on agency.