Structures Of Agency

Download or read book Structures of Agency written by Michael E. Bratman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-04 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of published and unpublished essays by distinguished philosopher Michael E. Bratman of Stanford University. They revolve around his influential theory, know as the "planning theory of intention and agency." Bratman's primary concern is with what he calls "strong" forms of human agency--including forms of human agency that are the target of our talk about self-determination, self-government, and autonomy. These essays are unified and cohesive in theme, and will be of interest to philosophers in ethics and metaphysics.

Download or read book Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation written by Margaret Scotford Archer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the relationship between structure and agency through human reflexivity and the internal conversation.

Download or read book Theory Beyond Structure and Agency written by Jean-Sébastien Guy and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-09-20 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand “agency” as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and “structure” as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion.

Download or read book The New American Cultural Sociology written by Philip Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Cultural Sociology presents a serious challenge to British Cultural Studies and European grand theory alike. This exciting volume brings together sixteen seminal papers by leading figures in what is emerging as an important intellectual tradition. It places them in the context of related work in Sociology and other disciplines, exploring the connections between cultural sociology and different approaches, such as comparative and historical research, postmodernism, and symbolic interactionism. The book is divided into three sections: Culture as Text and Code, The Production and Reception of Culture, and Culture in Action. Each section contains edited contributions, both theoretical and empirical, addressing the key debates in cultural sociology, including the autonomy of culture, power and culture, structure and agency and how to conceptualise meaning.

Download or read book The Causal Power of Social Structures written by Dave Elder-Vass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of structure and agency has been the subject of intense debate in the social sciences for over 100 years. This book offers a solution. Using a critical realist version of the theory of emergence, Dave Elder-Vass argues that, instead of ascribing causal significance to an abstract notion of social structure or a monolithic concept of society, we must recognise that it is specific groups of people that have social structural power. Some of these groups are entities with emergent causal powers, distinct from those of human individuals. Yet these powers also depend on the contributions of human individuals, and this book examines the mechanisms through which interactions between human individuals generate the causal powers of some types of social structures. The Causal Power of Social Structures makes particularly important contributions to the theory of human agency and to our understanding of normative institutions.

Download or read book Agents, Structures and International Relations written by Colin Wight and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The agent-structure problem is a much discussed issue in the field of international relations. In his comprehensive 2006 analysis of this problem, Colin Wight deconstructs the accounts of structure and agency embedded within differing IR theories and, on the basis of this analysis, explores the implications of ontology - the metaphysical study of existence and reality. Wight argues that there are many gaps in IR theory that can only be understood by focusing on the ontological differences that construct the theoretical landscape. By integrating the treatment of the agent-structure problem in IR theory with that in social theory, Wight makes a positive contribution to the problem as an issue of concern to the wider human sciences. At the most fundamental level politics is concerned with competing visions of how the world is and how it should be, thus politics is ontology.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Social Theory written by Austin Harrington and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Social Theory cuts across all relevant disciplines, theories, approaches, and schools to present the latest information and research.