Abstract
This essay urges researchers to respect differences among the agencies of different kinds of entities as well as among types of “distributed agency” understood as the agentic character of combinations of entities and events. In opposition, moreover, to the strong approach to sociomateriality in IS, the essay holds that most nexuses to which human people are integral aggregate the different agencies of the entities and events that compose them. The essay develops these theses by carefully sorting out different conceptions of agency and by both disambiguating and exploring four prominent claims contained in the idea that agency is tied to combinations of entities and events. Sorting out different conceptions of agency also shows that agency is causality, that is, particular forms of causality. The overall result is a defense of the integrity of the concept of agency as a reflection of the noun-verb structure of human languages.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 100553 |
| Journal | Information and Organization |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 Elsevier Ltd
Keywords
- Acting
- Agencements
- Agency
- Distributed agency
- Doing
- Practices
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Management Information Systems
- Information Systems
- Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
- Library and Information Sciences
- Management of Technology and Innovation