social-ontology.
48 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-131 v3 | Schwitzgebel — If materialism is true, the US is conscious | A conditional, informal argument. Any materialist criterion liberal enough to credit rabbits (and rabbit-level distributed aliens, the “squidbits”) and behaviourally human-like but oddly built aliens (Sirian supersquids, Antarean antheads) with consciousness also credits the United States. On this argument the US meets the usual materialist marks of consciousness: sophisticated information processing (roughly 10^14 person-to-person visual “connections”, comparable to the brain’s about 10^14 synapses), goal-directed environmental responsiveness, self-representation and historical embedding. The only exits are eliminativism, extreme sparseness or neurochauvinism, each costlier than the conclusion. The paper argues for no universal criterion. It ends undecided between three readings: US consciousness, a challenge to materialists, or grounds to distrust universal metaphysics of mind. | Read |
| NOTE-173 v3 | Griesemer & Shavit — Scaffolding individuality (3Cs) | The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Read |
| NOTE-185 | The moral psychology of obligation | Tomasello proposes that the human sense of obligation is “the internalized social/rational pressure from a joint or collective self-regulating agent ‘we’… to do what ‘we’ expect me to” (§3). It arises first, around age 3, inside joint-commitment collaboration with a partner, and then, from about 3–5 years, toward in-group members through collective identification. It is a “self-conscious motivation” whose coercive force is a threat to one’s cooperative identity. The support is a synthesis of developmental and comparative experiments, mostly from his own lab, on WEIRD children versus chimpanzees; the paper runs no new experiment. | Read |
| NOTE-340 | List — What is it like to be a group agent? | A short, conditional argument. Group agents are real by a thin functionalist definition and a naturalistic indispensability argument, and they have consciousness as awareness. Phenomenal consciousness turns on a bridge principle. Agency-, biology- and information-based principles are surveyed, and IIT is adopted. Three structural reasons (functional decomposability, robustness of steering bodies to partial randomisation, processing done mainly inside members) are said to make a group’s Φ low. The exclusion postulate is a second route. Nothing is computed. The result is used to ground a normative asymmetry: group agents have only derivative rights. | Read |
| NOTE-388 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle restates the 1995 theory in twenty pages. Social facts are facts involving collective intentionality. Institutional facts are the subclass in which collective acceptance imposes a status function, “X counts as Y in C”, carrying deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action. Language is constitutive, since such facts exist only as represented. He revises the book in two places: status indicators matter in their own right, and some Y terms are free-standing, with no X, as with corporations and money without currency. “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is now ranked as the more general form. Collective intentionality is assumed, not argued for. | Read |
| NOTE-389 | Ritchie — Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups | A structuralist framework for social groups. A social structure is a network of relations constitutively dependent on social factors; it can be overt or covert, intentionally or unintentionally created and instantiated, internal or external to what realizes it. Organized social groups are structured wholes whose internal social structures people occupy; feature social groups are social kinds, nodes in external social structures, which can be intersectional. A restriction to structures that intuitively exist or figure in explanations keeps arbitrary collections out. Motivated, not proved; nothing on agency or minds. | Read |
| NOTE-390 | Ritchie — What are groups? | Six criteria for any theory of groups (members vary across times and worlds; groups are temporary, contingent and located; coincident groups of one kind can be distinct) rule out groups as non-singular pluralities, fusions, Burge aggregates and Effingham’s sets. Proposed: a group is a realization of a structure whose nodes are defined by functional relations; it exists while every node is occupied, members are the occupiers, and two groups are identical at a time only with the same members in the same relations. A sketch of a view, silent on agency. | Read |
| NOTE-391 | Durkheim — Qu’est-ce qu’un fait social ? | Defines the social fact by exteriority to individual consciousness and external constraint, shown by sanction or by resistance, with diffusion plus independent existence as an equivalent test. Social facts are neither organic nor individual-psychic, so their substrate is society; they are general because collective, and “in each part because in the whole”. Statistics isolates collective currents from individual cases. Ways of being are consolidated ways of doing. All of it is definition and illustration; the elimination that yields “a new species” is assumed exhaustive. | Read |
| NOTE-392 | North — Institutions | An essay, not a proof. Institutions are humanly devised constraints, formal and informal; with technology they fix transaction and production costs and so the incentives of an economy. Village, bazaar and caravan exchange stayed put; early modern European trade evolved, through merchant law, negotiable bills, insurance and a constrained state. Change is path dependent through increasing returns. The game-theoretic motive is one paragraph, the history is narrative, and the one number (the transaction sector’s share of GNP) is cited, not derived. | Read |
| NOTE-393 | Epstein — Social Ontology (SEP) | A survey organised by its author’s own distinction: what grounds a social fact versus what anchors the category it falls under. It reports that ontological individualism is widely assumed and now contested; that grounding has displaced supervenience; that convention, collective acceptance, patterns, practices and language are rival theories of anchoring; and that whether anchoring is a distinct relation is disputed. It covers groups, group agency, institutions, race and gender, artifacts, money, law and language. Survey claims are reported, not argued; one citation (Epstein 2016) is missing from the bibliography, and Schwitzgebel 2015 is listed with critics of group phenomenal states. | Read |
| NOTE-394 | Haslanger — Gender and Race: (What) Are They? | An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account. Gender and race are defined as hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to indicate a female’s reproductive role, marked by that within the dominant ideology for subordinate positions, and subordinated in part because of it. Racialized groups are defined in parallel from features presumed to show ancestral links to a region. Gender in general and ethnicity are the non-hierarchical genus. The commonality and normativity objections are met by appeal to the project’s values. Stipulative, with no evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-395 | Hindriks & Guala — Institutions, rules, and equilibria | Institutions are correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria, represented by the players as rules. Searle’s constitutive rules are derived from a regulative rule by coining a term that splits it into a base rule and a status rule; the term is conservative and eliminable, so constitutive rules add a name and cognitive economy, not a new kind of fact. The derivation is shown for one toy institution and asserted in general. The reply adds that normativity needs no constitutive rules, because a right is a bundle of other people’s regulative obligations. | Read |
| NOTE-405 | Rai & Fiske 2011, relationship regulation | A theoretical review. Moral psychology is the regulation of social relationships: an act is right or wrong according to the relational model participants and observers apply, not according to its harm, fairness or purity in the abstract. Fiske’s four models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing) each carry a moral motive: Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, Proportionality. Honour killing, obedient massacre, blood feud and collateral damage are each read as one motive at work. Purity and ingroup loyalty are both Unity. No new data are reported. | Read |
| NOTE-434 | The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization | Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion, stated through predictive coding. The brain runs an allostatic internal model. Its predictions are concepts, initiated in agranular limbic cortex and corrected by prediction error. Interoceptive consequences are felt as affect. An emotion is a categorization by an emotion concept. Degeneracy and population thinking deny emotion categories neural essences. Basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories are rejected; descriptive appraisals are kept as products of categorization. | Read |
| NOTE-455 | The Normative Constitution of Agency | Korsgaard asks whether agency is natural (a movement caused by the right mental state) or normatively constituted (a movement backed by an agent whose unity is achieved by following norms). Ordinary attribution of action implies activity and identity. Self-constitution explains both: the categorical and hypothetical imperatives give action the form of self-determined efficacy, and the maxims chosen under them constitute practical identity. Reflective self-consciousness breaks given unity and sets the task of rebuilding it, so unity of agency is “an achievement, not a given”. | Read |
| NOTE-456 | Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition | An enactive account of social cognition built on coordination dynamics. When coordination and the encounter shape each other, the interaction gains its own precarious operational closure; it is social only if the interactors stay autonomous. Coordinated sense-making then ranges from one partner’s sense-making being modulated to meanings made jointly. Conceptual throughout; evidence is illustrative (corridor, charades, mother–infant timing, perceptual crossing). | Read |
| NOTE-464 | A Planning Agent’s Self-Governance over Time | Bratman’s model of a planning agent’s self-governance over time. It needs (1) planned temporally extended activity with a time-frame to “plan’s end”, (2) synchronic self-governance along the way, (3) cross-temporal links of intention that are intrapersonal analogues of shared intention, so the agent acts “together” with herself, and (4) “diachronicalized” standpoints holding a conditional, reflexive end of diachronic self-governance. The model makes some willpower and resistance to shuffling self-governed and excludes the toxin case. Argued by cases, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-550 | List & Pettit — Group Agency and Supervenience | Four conditions of agency (§2). A group’s judgments supervene on members’ contributions under a constitution (§3). With a universal domain, robust group rationality is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience (Propositions 1–3), and consistent with set-wise supervenience, as the premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures show (Propositions 4–5; Table 4). The group’s judgment on a conclusion can be fixed by members’ judgments on premises alone. Emergent agency without members’ conception of the group is judged unintelligible (§6). | Read |
| NOTE-552 | Towards a Theory of Collective Emotions | Collective emotion as synchronous convergence in affective responding towards one event or object. The minimal case needs only shared appraisal structures. Mutual awareness (contagion, mediated sharing) and group membership (identity, collective intentions, norms, collective memory, group-based sentiments) amplify it and change its quality, including a transition from “I-mode” to “We-mode” collective emotion. A conceptual synthesis with no data; the authors say the key linkages lack evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-553 | Huebner — Genuinely collective emotions | Collective emotion is defended by extending a homuncular, computational account of individual emotion to distributed systems. Fear needs four integrated capacities (p. 10). The USS Palau crew implements most of them but shows no fear, so it is reclassified as collective danger detection; a 2008 campaign is offered as a likelier case, without data. Unfelt collective emotion is defended by arguing that some individual fear is non-conscious (§5), and functional kinds are defended against homology (§6). Gilbert’s plural-subject account is rejected as reducible to individual commitments. | Read |
| NOTE-554 | List — Three kinds of collective attitudes | Aggregate attitudes: a rule or market summarises members’ attitudes; proposition-wise supervenience; no direct role; rationality contingent (majority beliefs on p, q, p∧q can be inconsistent, Table 1). Common attitudes: all hold, with common awareness; enriched proposition-wise supervenience; coordination; consistent by unanimity. Corporate attitudes: a group agent’s; holistic supervenience, like non-reductive physicalism; action-guiding; rationality presupposed. Three lessons of near-independence; Table 2 summarises. | Read |
| NOTE-568 | The Corporation as a Moral Person | A moral person is a non-eliminable subject of accountability, and that requires intentional agency. A corporation’s Internal Decision (CID) Structure, an organizational chart plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy, licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts done for corporate reasons. Corporations therefore differ in kind from mobs and can be full moral persons. That intentional agency suffices for moral personhood is asserted here and argued elsewhere. | Read |
| NOTE-569 | The Conversable, Responsible Corporation | A syllogism. Corporations are conversable agents: through authorised spokespersons they avow attitudes and make commitments, and because mechanical aggregation can be inconsistent they must form minds of their own. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible, having a significant choice, the capacity for normative judgment, and control over acting on it. So corporations are fit to be held responsible. | Read |
| NOTE-570 | Shaping the Institutional Mind | Asks why ascribing mental states to institutions is useful. Both defenders and critics of group minds assume ascription tracks pre-existing causes. On the regulative view of folk psychology, ascription shapes its target. Two cases: the collective knowledge doctrine, after which banks built systems to detect reportable deposits, and corporate narratives and counter-narratives. The paper is agnostic about whether institutions have minds. | Read |
| NOTE-582 | Episteme Symposium on Group Agency: Replies to Gaus, Cariani, Sylvan, and Briggs | The authors answer four commentators on Group Agency. To Gaus: rationality is classical, ecological rationality is its relativisation to an environment, and robust group rationality may be relaxed without rescuing proposition-wise aggregation. To Cariani: chapter 4 offers possibility results. To Sylvan: group attitudes are not reducible to role-based member acceptance. To Briggs: group agents are fit to be held responsible in their own right, with rights restricted by normative individualism. | Read |
| NOTE-649 | Large AI models are cultural and social technologies | Argues that large models are a cultural and social technology, not intelligent agents: lossy, uninvertible summaries of human-produced corpora that, like prices and bureaucratic categories, allow the information to be reorganized at scale. The argument is by analogy and classification; no evidence is offered that could have come out otherwise. It names one mechanism (fitting the training distribution on average makes models worst where data are rare, which may homogenize culture) and leaves both it and its remedy untested. | Read |
| NOTE-698 | Floridi — Distributed morality in an information society | Distributed morality (DM) is the case where morally loaded actions of a multiagent system result from interactions among its members that are each morally neutral or negligible. The model is distributed knowledge: A knows P∨Q, B knows ¬P, and only the “supra-agent” AB knows Q. The paper models neutrality with two moral thresholds, which make environments fault-tolerant to small evils and inert to small goods, and it names the task of aggregating potential goods and fragmenting potential evils. It introduces “infraethics”, the first-order framework of moral enablers (trust, privacy, transparency …) that is not morally good in itself. The analogy is not exact. Distributed knowledge combines different contents logically, while every example of DM sums contributions of one kind past a threshold, so what separates DM from a sum of actions is the threshold on moral evaluation, a parameter the paper leaves unspecified. No criterion of agency is applied to the supra-agent, and responsibility for DM, which Floridi & Sanders 2004 promised, is still not given. | Read |
| NOTE-701 | Floridi & Sanders — On the morality of artificial agents | Agenthood is fixed only at a level of abstraction (LoA). At the LoA the paper proposes, an agent is interactive, autonomous and adaptable, and a moral agent is any agent that can cause moral good or evil. Accountability (being the source of the action) needs no mental states; responsibility (praise and blame) needs intentional states. So artificial agents and organisations can be accountable moral agents without being responsible. The case is made by examples and by rebutting four objections. Its own MENACE example shows that agenthood vanishes when the LoA is lowered to include the code. The paper leaves that LoA-relativity unbounded, says only that “for most entities there is no LoA at which they can be considered an agent” (p. 26), and promises a payoff for distributed morality that it does not deliver. | Read |
| NOTE-702 | Floridi — AI as agency without intelligence and the MRA thesis | A taxonomy, not an argument for its thesis. The case for the Multiple Realisability of Agency over the Artificial Realisability of Intelligence is announced (evidence, common sense, Ockham, literature) and then set aside: the paper assumes AI is an agent and asks what kind (p. 2). Floridi & Sanders’ three criteria come back, loosened, so that interactivity alone makes a river a “natural agent” (p. 9). The criteria do not separate AI from other artefacts. Origin, mechanism, where the goals come from, and asserted absences (no intelligence, no mental states) do that. No level of abstraction is ever specified. | Read |
| NOTE-736 | Strawson — Intention and Convention in Speech Acts | Austin’s thesis that illocutions are conventional fails for warnings, entreaties and objections. Their force is a wholly overt, audience-directed intention: Grice’s three intentions plus a fourth, with uptake as the audience’s grasp of it. The scheme strains on orders and fails on institutional acts. What all illocutions share is an overt intention meant to be understood. | Read |
| NOTE-867 | Hutchins — How a cockpit remembers its speeds | In an MD-80 approach, the correspondence between airspeeds and wing configurations for the day’s landing weight is computed once, 25 to 30 minutes before landing, by selecting a printed speed card with the displayed gross weight, and is stored in the positions of movable bugs on both airspeed indicators; when the plane slows 10 to 15 minutes later, the needle’s approach to a bug cues each flap call by a judgment of spatial proximity. Hutchins argues that this memory belongs to the cockpit as a functional system and that speed bugs do not improve any pilot’s memory but replace a recall-and-scale-reading task with a perceptual one. The account is a stylized description of mandated procedure, informed by more than 100 observer flights and simulator recordings, with no measured performance, no comparison of crews with and without bugs, and no failure cases; the claim that the arrangement changes what the system can do is established by analysis of the tasks, not by data. | Read |
| NOTE-1078 | Sewell — A theory of structure | A reformulation of Giddens’s duality of structure. Structures are sets of virtual schemas and actual resources that sustain each other: resources enact schemas and schemas are validated by the resources their enactment yields. Change comes from inside, because structures are multiple and intersect, schemas transpose to new cases, resources are polysemic and accumulate unpredictably. Agency is the capacity to transpose schemas and remobilize resources. A conceptual argument, with a conjecture that depth, more than power, makes a structure durable. | Read |
| NOTE-1095 | Sales Practices Investigation Report | The board’s own investigation finds that the harm came from the sales model and the performance management that enforced it, kept in place by a decentralized structure and a culture of deference, with control functions that handled cases one by one and a board told too little. It names and sanctions individual leaders as well. It also records that leadership blamed individual employees, and that signals of the harm reached people who could not act on them, or were filtered before they reached those who could. | Read |
| NOTE-1230 | Jaksland — Naturalized, fundamental, and feminist metaphysics all at once | A methodological paper, not an assessment of agential realism as quantum mechanics, which it assumes. Barad holds agential realism to be naturalized metaphysics, justified by quantum mechanics and applied once, to the one reality, whose scope then extends to the lifeworld; she rejects reading it as analogy or as a template that other domains instantiate. That extension is threatened by Newtonian mechanics being a good approximation in the macroscopic domain. It survives only if some ontological features (the subject–object and word–world dualisms, representationalism) are all-or-nothing and admit no metaphysical approximation. Jaksland leaves open whether any do, finds individualism “immediately more agreeable” as something that can obtain by approximation, and argues that even without such features the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is contingent (on the size of Planck’s constant), not principled. | Read |
| NOTE-1244 | Supporters, Followers, Fans, and Flaneurs: A Taxonomy of Spectator Identities in Football | A conceptual taxonomy of how spectators identify with football clubs, on two axes: traditional–consumer (the basis of investment) and hot–cool (how central the club is to the self). Supporters are traditional and hot; followers traditional and cool; fans consumer and hot; flâneurs consumer and cool. Giulianotti argues that football’s “hypercommodification” since the late 1980s moves identification from the supporter towards the flâneur, while clubs still depend on supporters to make the spectacle flâneurs consume. Ideal types, with no data. | Read |
| NOTE-1266 | Being one of us. Group identification, joint actions, and collective intentionality | ”Group identification”, as philosophers of shared agency use it (Pacherie, Petersson), runs together two separable processes. One is adopting the group’s perspective, asking “what should we do?”. The other is self-transformation, coming to understand oneself as a member. The first can occur without the second (the discursive dilemma) and the second without the first (toddlers’ joint action before age three). Self-transformation is not a belief but a Pushmi-Pullyu representation: “you are a member of us; act as such”, at once describing and motivating, triggered by cues such as joint attention, and not under direct rational control. A conceptual paper. | Read |
| NOTE-1288 | Team Reasoning and Intentional Cooperation for Mutual Benefit | Theories of social preference can always fit an observed choice by positing a preference for it, and their non-trivial forms cannot represent trust: on Rabin’s intention-based preferences, (send, return) in a Trust Game cannot be common knowledge in equilibrium. Team reasoning can, but Bacharach’s version maximizes a team utility that trades members off and needs no assurance. Sugden’s Schema of Cooperative Team Reasoning aims at a mutually beneficial practice, in which each member gains over her maximin payoff, and binds only when there is reciprocal reason to believe the others endorse it. A market exchange in each party’s interest can then be intended as cooperation for mutual benefit. | Read |
| NOTE-1289 | Second-Person Engagement, Self-Alienation, and Group-Identification | A reconstruction and defence of Husserl’s empathy-based account of the “we”. Truly social acts need an I–Thou relation of reciprocal, communicative address, beyond even reciprocal empathy. In it I am aware of myself as addressed, and by taking over the other’s perspective on me (“self-alienation”) the self–other difference stays present but is “somewhat downplayed”. That is a formal, necessary but not sufficient, condition of seeing oneself as one of us. “A we, a first-person plural, is not an enlarged I.” Zahavi likens it to self-categorization theory’s self-stereotyping, replies to Heidegger and Schmid that the “we” can be analysed and that self-awareness precedes in-group bias, and concedes that the face-to-face “we” does not cover anonymous ones. | Read |
| NOTE-1295 | Reconceptualizing Individuals, Categories, and the Social Group: Self-Categorization Theory 2.0 | An insider’s critique and reconstruction of self-categorization theory. Categorization into equivalence classes yields interchangeable members, not a group entity. Meta-contrast, taken as the mechanism of entity formation, is intractable (2ⁿ subsets: 9.3 hours for 25 people at 1,000 operations a second). Its prototype semantics fails compositionality. The proposed SCT2.0: self-categorization is the categorization of intentional agents; groups are holistic entities triggered by cues to collective intentionality; and relations are propositional, in a language of thought. A theoretical paper; its own evidence is under review. | Read |
| NOTE-1303 | Enemies with benefits: the dual role of rivalry in shaping sports fans’ identity | Stadium-intercept survey at eight Bundesliga clubs in December 2014 (N = 571 after 164 fans with no named archrival were dropped); SEM. Perceived rivalry intensity lowers fans’ sense of being respected by the rival’s fans (β = −.31). It raises perceived distinctiveness (.27), cohesion (.20) and respect from other clubs’ fans (.09). These positive effects run indirectly, almost entirely through perceived reciprocity of the rivalry (indirect .18–.20), and barely through disidentification with the rival. For respect from other fans the direct path is negative (−.08, ns). Cross-sectional, with a single-item predictor. | Read |
| NOTE-1309 | Being one of us: we-identities and self-categorization theory | A we-identity is held as a group member, is at times salient, is endorsed, and varies in affective salience. Self-categorization theory explains we-identities by depersonalization: seeing oneself as an interchangeable exemplar of a prototype. Phenomenologists (Zahavi, Salice) have adopted it for the “we” in general. But close relationships, such as long friendships and partnerships, yield we-identities by mutual individualization, in which each grasps the other as non-substitutable. So depersonalization is not necessary for a we-identity. León sketches a socially extended account, drawing on Husserl and on extended-mind criteria. | Read |
| NOTE-1351 | Flack — Multiple time-scales and the developmental dynamics of social systems | A review of the pigtailed macaque power-structure work. Fight outcomes flip; the peaceful silent bared-teeth signal that encodes a subordination contract almost never does, so the signalling network changes about two orders of magnitude more slowly and predicts fights better than any single fight. Power, read from that network, is a further slow variable. That the animals perceive and use these variables is argued from earlier studies and stated as what “the data suggest”, not shown here. | Read |
| NOTE-1386 | Feldman and Pentland — Reconceptualizing organizational routines | Feldman and Pentland split an organizational routine into an ostensive aspect, the pattern as participants understand and refer to it, and a performative aspect, its particular enactments, and argue that the ostensive guides, accounts for and names performances while performances create, maintain and modify the ostensive, so that variation and selective retention inside one routine make it a source of endogenous change. A theory paper with one worked example, academic hiring, and no data of its own. | Read |
| NOTE-1431 | Zaibert — Collective Intentions and Collective Intentionality | A critic’s report of Searle’s 1990 paper, with its pages. Searle there calls the irreducibility of collective intentions an intuition, says “I have not demonstrated that no such analysis could ever succeed”, and rejects Tuomela and Miller’s reduction by one counterexample. Of his four analyses of the hollandaise case he favours a by-means-of intention that Zaibert shows has the same form as an individual’s firing a gun by pulling a trigger: a complex individual intention, not a collective one. Zaibert argues that intentions, unlike desires, cannot be irreducibly collective, and leaves collective desires open. | Read |
| NOTE-1482 | Bencherki — A pre-individual perspective to organizational action | After Simondon, action is pre-individual: it is not an agent’s deed but a difference that contributes to the individuation of persons and organizations at once, and authorship is an outcome. Affect is how a person finds a pre-individual load that only a collective individuation can resolve, and its refusal is felt as disindividuation. An action’s signification is its participation in an individuation. The illustration, a documentary on military spouses, sorts the army’s treatment of the women’s actions into co-individuation, channeling and usurpation. | Read |
| NOTE-1483 | Bencherki & Iliadis — Organization as informational individuation | Proposes Simondon’s informational individuation as the theory of communication that CCO research lacks. Information is a differential of action potential between differently ordered domains; communication is its kin-to-kin propagation, which orders each domain it crosses; meaning is that reordering; organizations and members are coexisting informational levels, not stages. Four propositions and one meeting excerpt; no test, and agency is not theorized. | Read |
| NOTE-1484 | Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy — Agency without agents | A conceptual paper. Agency is redefined, after Massumi and Simondon, as the affective force that governs a transition between individuation processes toward an augmented ability to act. It is expressed in a communicative event in which one process takes up another’s excess action, and it may start a collective transindividuation. Agents are its effects, not its sources. It is illustrated by rereading one meeting from Cooren’s MSF ethnography. The paper gives a vocabulary for redescription, with no criterion that would let an observation count against it. | Read |
| NOTE-1489 | Tsoukas & Chia — On organizational becoming | A conceptual paper. It reverses the priority of organization and change. Change is the reweaving of actors’ webs of beliefs and habits as they accommodate new experience. It is driven by the radial structure of categories, whose nonprototypical applications extend them, and by human reflexivity. Organization is both the attempt to stem that change and the pattern that emerges from it. Its illustrations are other researchers’ ethnographies. Its becoming is carried by human agents. | Read |