Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Social ontology — what social facts, groups, institutions and social kinds are, and what makes them exist — collective intentionality, joint commitment, status functions, convention, social construction, and whether groups can be agents or minds (group: philosophy; ADR-017).
34 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-057 | Emotion categories are populations of variable instances grouped by the perceiver’s concepts, not natural kinds with a shared neural or appraisal mechanism | Barrett (2017), LIT-542: degeneracy, population thinking, and a table of findings in which no region, network, pattern or neuron is consistent for an emotion category. From these she concludes that categories such as fear are populations of variable instances, grouped by a goal and constructed by categorization with a concept. She rejects basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories as positing a “Lockean essence”. This is the record’s only read statement of the view. The record’s philosophy holdings sharpen it. Pernu (LIT-147) shows that many-to-one realisation at a fine grain does not rule out one variable at a coarser grain, so degeneracy alone does not carry the conclusion, and Table 1 has to. Searle (LIT-482) shows that Barrett’s comparison with money is to observer-relative function, not to institutions. Rivals the appraisal account, THEORY-055. Proposed: one theoretical paper, no independent test, and the reply unread. | Proposed |
| THEORY-065 | The unity that makes a movement an agent’s action is achieved by conformity to the constitutive norms of agency, not given by the causal unity of a mind, so collective agents are agents in the same sense as individual ones | Korsgaard (2014), LIT-587: an action is a movement “backed by the agent as a whole”, and ordinary attribution implies that the agent was active and that the action expresses who she is. Following the categorical and hypothetical imperatives gives action the form of self-determined efficacy; the content of the maxims chosen under that form constitutes practical identity. Self-consciousness of one’s own attitudes breaks the unity an animal is given, and reason is the work of rebuilding it, so unity of agency “is an achievement, not a given”, and people can act together “in the most literal sense”. The Tanner Lectures (LIT-564) supply the reflective structure the chapter assumes. Argued, with the Kantian premise assumed and the collective mechanism stated in a paragraph. | Proposed |
| THEORY-125 | A group can itself be in an emotional state that is not its members’ states in aggregation, when its distributed routines integrate the capacities an emotion requires into one action-oriented representation; because emotions are functional kinds such a state need not be felt, and no actual case has yet been shown | Huebner (2010), LIT-702: a genuinely collective emotion is a state of a group that “could not be exhaustively characterized in terms of intentional states of individuals in aggregation”. Fear requires danger detection, redeployment of attention, system-wide preparatory change and their coordination into one state with indicative content and imperative force; a distributed system can integrate routines that way. Some individual emotions are non-conscious, so a group’s need not be felt, and emotion kinds are functional (“like vodka”), so lacking homologous mechanisms does not exclude groups. The paper establishes a possibility, not an instance: its worked case, the USS Palau crew, turns out to be “collective detection of danger in the absence of a fear response”, and the replacement, the 2008 McCain–Palin campaign, is offered as “intuitively plausible” pending anthropological data. Proposed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-126 v2 | A collective emotion is the synchronous convergence of individuals’ affective responses to one event or object, produced bottom-up by shared appraisal, contagion and group membership, and it needs no group subject; it takes a We-mode form when the appraisals rest on collectively intentional states | von Scheve & Ismer (2013), LIT-696, a conceptual synthesis with no data: collective emotion is “synchronous convergence in affective responding across individuals towards a specific event or object”. Its minimal case is shared appraisal with no mutual awareness (drivers in one traffic jam). Mutual awareness and membership in a collective amplify it, and appraisals grounded in collective intentions give “We-mode” collective emotion, which they expect to differ in quality. Barsade (2002), LIT-706, supplies the one measured instance: in 26 groups with no confederate, the intraclass correlation of members’ mood rose from .00 to .24. The account posits no group subject and does not deny one. Proposed: the definition is stipulated, the routes beyond contagion are untested, and the We-mode clause is a hypothesis its authors say lacks evidence. | Proposed |
| THEORY-127 v4 | On the court agenda, and on any agenda in which every proposition reaches every other by conditional entailment and some minimally inconsistent triple stays consistent with two of its members negated, a group whose judgments are robustly rational under universal domain and respect unanimity cannot form its judgment on each proposition from its members’ judgments on that proposition alone unless one member dictates; its judgments must supervene on the members’ whole sets of judgments, and so can depart from what the members judge on the same proposition while being wholly fixed by them | List & Pettit (2006), LIT-705: under universal domain, robust group rationality (complete, consistent, deductively closed group judgments for every profile of rational member judgments) is inconsistent with majoritarian, uniform proposition-wise and proposition-wise supervenience (Propositions 1–3; the last two proved elsewhere and cited), and consistent with set-wise supervenience, which the premise-based and distributed premise-based procedures achieve (Propositions 4–5). Members’ judgments on a conclusion can then be insufficient, or even unnecessary, to fix the group’s judgment on it. List (2014), LIT-700, makes this the mark of a third kind of collective attitude: corporate attitudes, a group agent’s, supervene “holistically”, while aggregate and common attitudes supervene proposition by proposition. Active since 2026-10-19 for categorical judgments on the court agenda and on agendas with two stated connectedness conditions: the record re-derived Proposition 3 (and Proposition 2 as a corollary) itself. The extension to corporate attitudes in general is QUESTION-152. | Active |
| THEORY-131 v2 | A corporation whose Corporate Internal Decision (CID) Structure, an organizational chart of stations plus recognition rules embedded in corporate policy, licenses redescribing its members’ acts as done for corporate reasons is a non-eliminable intentional agent, unlike a mob; and if intentional agency suffices for moral personhood, which French asserts but here says he cannot further argue, such a corporation is a full-fledged moral person | French (1979), LIT-727. Moral persons are non-eliminable subjects of accountability, so intentional agents. A corporation’s CID Structure licenses redescribing members’ acts as corporate acts, and an act that implements established corporate policy is done for corporate reasons. Proposed: the step from agency to moral personhood is asserted, and corporate intentionality is shown by licensed redescription, not by any test. | Proposed |
| THEORY-137 v2 | Attributions of mental states to institutions, such as the knowledge that the collective knowledge doctrine of corporate criminal law attributes to a corporation no member of which held it, work largely by shaping the institutions to which they are made rather than by describing states they already had: the attribution holds the institution to a norm, the institution builds structures to meet it, and it becomes more predictable from the intentional stance, whether or not institutions really have minds | Tollefsen (2025), LIT-736. Both sides of the group-mind debate treat ascription as tracking pre-existing causes. On the regulative view of folk psychology it shapes its target. In United States v. Bank of New England a court held a bank to know what no employee knew, and banks then built systems to detect reportable deposits. Narratives regulate too. Proposed: the regulative view is assumed, and the effect on banks is asserted, not documented. | Proposed |
| THEORY-139 v4 | A corporation that forms its judgments through authorised avowal and corrects the inconsistency any mechanical aggregation of its members’ views produces has a mind of its own, and as a conversable agent it meets the conditions for being fit to be held responsible: a significant choice, the capacity to judge its options normatively, and control over acting on that judgment | Pettit (2017), LIT-718, restating Responsibility Incorporated (2007). Corporations are conversable agents: spokespersons avow and commit in their name, and because majority aggregation can be inconsistent they must form their own minds. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible under three conditions, which corporations meet. Proposed: it is an argument, and its empirical premise about corporate procedure is asserted rather than shown. | Proposed |
| THEORY-351 v2 | In a two-pilot airliner cockpit, setting the approach speeds as bugs on the airspeed indicators, prepared 25 to 30 minutes ahead in a low-workload phase from a card selected by the displayed gross weight, turns recall and scale reading at the moment of use into a judgement of spatial proximity, so the cockpit system remembers the speeds without either pilot’s memory being improved; this is argued by task analysis of mandated procedure, not measured | Hutchins (1995), LIT-1066, read in NOTE-867. A stylized task analysis of one airline’s MD-80 procedure, informed by observation but reporting no measurements. The speed-card booklet, filtered by the displayed gross weight, is the system’s long-term memory; the values pass through speech to bugs on two airspeed indicators, and on approach the pilots judge the needle’s nearness to a bug instead of recalling and reading speeds. The paper concludes that the memory is “not made primarily of pilot memory”. It analyses only success, for an anticipated, mandated and invariant task with a few values needed in a fixed order, so it says nothing about search for one item among many under a deadline. Cognition in the Wild (LIT-1060) is Unavailable. | Proposed |
| THEORY-414 | Institutions are rules in equilibrium, correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria that the players represent to themselves as rules, and a constitutive rule ‘X counts as Y in C’ is a regulative rule split by a coined term into a base rule and a status rule, so the term adds a name and cognitive economy but no new kind of fact | Hindriks & Guala (2015, online 2014), LIT-481, read with the authors’ reply to six commentators in NOTE-395. The equilibrium half is a clear synthesis of Lewis, Aumann, Aoki and Greif. The reduction of Searle’s constitutive rules is worked once, for a toy first-occupancy property, and asserted in general; it depends on a reading of “collective acceptance” loose enough to make the “counts as” biconditionals hold by construction, and on extensional equivalence of behaviour. The reply adds that a right is a bundle of others’ regulative obligations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-418 v3 | A collective becomes a new level of individuality, on this sketch, only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it and some core interactions have become generatively entrenched and, as the paper asserts without deriving it from entrenchment, it has organizational closure; such a community can then be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone | Griesemer & Shavit (2023), LIT-188, read in NOTE-173. A conceptual sketch, so called by its authors, with no model, data or operational criteria. The paper’s two headline claims, that it describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity, appear only in the abstract and are not argued. Stage 3 is defined by a shared goal (§1), and §3 makes sustaining the community “a focal goal of every participating member”, which presupposes the group. The one argued conclusion, that inheritance at the new level evolves “in tandem”, is hedged and in tension with §2. | Proposed |
| THEORY-429 | Institutions are the humanly devised formal and informal constraints on interaction; with technology they fix the costs of transacting, organisations arise to exploit the opportunities they offer, and an economy grows when its framework rewards productive rather than redistributive activity, while increasing returns to the institutional matrix make frameworks path dependent, so that economies with different frameworks diverge and need not converge | North (1991), LIT-489, read in full in NOTE-392. A programmatic essay, not an argument. The definition is stipulated; the game-theoretic motive for third-party enforcement is one paragraph; the evidence is narrative history from secondary sources, with the staged sequence of exchange disclaimed as history (n. 1); path dependence is carried over from Arthur and David on technology by analogy. It leaves open why informal constraints bind, which is the question Hindriks and Guala put to rules accounts. | Proposed |
| THEORY-487 | Social ontology asks two separable questions about a social category: what grounds a fact of that kind, the conditions something must meet, and what anchors those conditions, the facts that put them in place; theories of the field, such as convention, collective acceptance and practice, answer the second, and a theory can be individualist about one and not the other | Epstein (2018; rev. 2024), the SEP entry Social Ontology, LIT-487, read in NOTE-393 with the author’s précis of The Ant Trap (LIT-478, otherwise unread). A survey organised by its author’s own distinction, likened to semantics and metasemantics. It rests on a survey that reports the dissents (Hawley, Schaffer, Haslanger) in a sentence each and argues the distinction by example. Whether anchoring is a relation distinct from grounding is reported as the author’s view and as disputed. | Proposed |
| THEORY-511 | Illocutionary acts that are not essentially conventional, such as warning, entreating and objecting, are individuated by a wholly overt, audience-directed intention, Grice’s three intentions with a fourth that the audience recognise the second, and are performed when that intention is understood; acts such as verdicts and umpires’ calls exist only within rule-governed procedures and fall outside the scheme | Strawson (1964), LIT-1043, read in full in NOTE-736, amending Grice (1957), LIT-1042. Against Austin, some illocutions need no convention beyond the linguistic; their force is an overt intention meant to be understood, and uptake is the audience’s recognition of it, an aim rather than an achievement. Orders fit “with some strain”; verdicts, umpires’ calls and marriages do not fit at all. The scheme predicts no non-institutional case in which the overt intention is fixed and the act changes, which gives QUESTION-073 a definite rival to test. The amended analysis is offered as necessary, not sufficient. | Proposed |
| THEORY-520 | When coordination between two autonomous agents and the continuation of their encounter shape each other, the interaction gains an autonomy of its own, a precarious self-sustaining organization that lasts only while both agents stay autonomous; coordinating movement then coordinates sense-making, so some social understanding, such as recognising a partner, is a property of the interaction’s dynamics and not of either individual | De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007), LIT-571, read in NOTE-456. A conceptual account built on coordination dynamics, with illustrative evidence: the corridor, charades, mother–infant timing and the perceptual-crossing experiments of Auvray et al., reported, not new. NOTE-456 declined a THEORY because the source carries no claim beyond its definition. The claim with some support is the perceptual-crossing one; the autonomy of the interaction is a definition, and the implications are called “speculative at this stage” by the authors. | Proposed |
| THEORY-536 | A group agent’s attitudes are real and non-redundant: each group belief needs members’ role-based acceptance, by assent in the group’s name or by acting on it in an executive role, but that acceptance does not explain or reduce the group belief, because which members’ acceptance counts, and that it plays the role of belief, is fixed only from the group-level view | List & Pettit (2012), LIT-730, their replies to an Episteme symposium on Group Agency, read in NOTE-582. The claim is argued in a few pages against one commentator, Sylvan, whose paper was not read, and it points to the book (LIT-391, unread). The authors grant that non-redundancy is a matter of degree and that the book takes the existence of group agents “mostly … for granted”. A position on explanation, not a proof, and not a claim that groups have experiences. | Proposed |
| THEORY-549 | A structured group is not identical to its members: two groups of one kind can have the same members at every time and still be two, which theories that identify a group with a plurality, fusion, aggregate or set of its members cannot allow, and a view of groups as realizations of structures with functionally defined nodes can | Ritchie (2013, online 2012), LIT-479, read in NOTE-390, with its 2018 sequel LIT-486 (NOTE-389). Six criteria for a theory of groups, each defended by one example, rule out non-singular pluralities, Sider’s fusions, Burge’s aggregates and Effingham’s sets; the decisive one is Coincidence. Groups as realized structures meet all six. The refutations are strong given the criteria; the criteria rest on single cases, and the positive view is a four-page sketch with no persistence conditions. It says nothing about agency or minds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-575 | ’Social group’ names two kinds of thing: organized social groups, such as teams, courts and families, are structured wholes whose people occupy the nodes of an internal social structure, while feature social groups, such as women, racial groups and classes, are social kinds, nodes in external social structures, and are not concrete wholes | Ritchie (2020, online 2018), LIT-486, read in NOTE-389, building on her 2013 view (LIT-479). A social structure is one constitutively, not merely causally, dependent on social factors. Organized groups realize internal structures; feature groups are positions in external ones, which can be intersectional. A framework offered to “motivate”, in the author’s word: accounts of gender are shown to fit it, not argued for against rivals, and the work of excluding arbitrary collections is done by a restriction the framework imports. Silent on agency; the record uses it to say which groups the agency questions are about. | Proposed |
| THEORY-625 v2 | Institutional facts are status functions, imposed by collective acceptance on things that cannot perform the function by their physical structure alone; the status carries deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action, and it exists only as represented, so institutions require language; ‘X counts as Y in C’ is the common case of the more general ‘We accept (S has power (S does A))‘ | Searle (2006), LIT-482, read in NOTE-388 in its Papers printing, the record’s readable statement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485, unread). Conceptual analysis, not argument: the three primitives are asserted to suffice, collective intentionality is referred to an unread 1990 paper, and the animal line is hedged. The paper revises the book: some Y terms have no X, and the general form is “We accept (S has power (S does A))”. Hindriks & Guala’s rules-in-equilibrium account is its rival on what a constitutive rule adds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-626 | Moral judgments are made relative to the social relationship an act is taken to occur within: each of four relational models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing) carries a moral motive (Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, Proportionality), so the same act can be required under one and wrong under another | Rai & Fiske (2011), LIT-507, read in NOTE-405. A theoretical review with no new data. Its strongest support is cited work on relational framing and on morally motivated violence. Which model is in force is read off after the fact, so the central claim risks being unfalsifiable as stated. Purity and ingroup loyalty are assigned to one motive, Unity, by argument. | Proposed |
| THEORY-648 | A social fact is a way of acting, thinking or feeling that exists outside individual consciousness and can constrain the individual from outside, shown by sanction or by the resistance it offers to violation; such a fact is general in a group because it is collective, not collective because general, so the group is its substrate | Durkheim (1894; book 1895), chapter I of Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, LIT-484, read in French in NOTE-391. A definition argued from examples, which its author calls “un simple résumé des données immédiates de l’observation” (n. 3). Its two load-bearing steps are asserted: that what is neither organic nor individual-psychic must have society as its substrate, and that constraint is present even where no one feels it. It is a claim about the object of sociology, not a group-mind thesis. | Proposed |
| THEORY-667 | Gender and race, defined as a feminist and antiracist theory needs them, are hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone subordinated in part because she is taken to have bodily features presumed to show a female’s reproductive role, a racialized group is one subordinated or privileged in part because its members are taken to have features presumed to show ancestry from a region, and on these definitions both are real, social and contingent | Haslanger (2000), LIT-480, read in NOTE-394. An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account: the definitions are chosen for what a critical theory needs, and the author is “less committed to saying that this is what gender is and what race is” (p. 52). It is tied to a descriptive claim, that our gender and race talk tracks social kinds obscured by its manifest content (p. 34), which the paper asserts and does not test. Its empirical premises about race are uncited. Not a discovery about bodies, and not a claim that every female is a woman in its sense. | Proposed |
| THEORY-725 | On the court agenda {P, Q, R, R iff (P and Q)} under universal domain, proposition-wise majority voting is not robustly rational, while the premise-based procedure is, and it makes the group’s judgments a function of the members’ whole judgment sets that the members’ judgments on the conclusion neither fix nor need to enter | List & Pettit (2006), LIT-705, read in full in NOTE-550, for the court agenda only. Proposition 1: majority voting on each proposition is not robustly rational, by the discursive dilemma. Proposition 4: the premise-based procedure, majorities on P, Q and the biconditional with R derived, is robustly rational and makes the group’s set a function of the members’ sets. Under it the members’ judgments on R do not fix the group’s (weak discontinuity), and under the distributed procedure they need not enter (strong discontinuity, Proposition 5). The general impossibility for proposition-wise rules is THEORY-127, still Proposed. | Active |
| THEORY-1083 | Barad holds agential realism to be naturalized metaphysics justified by quantum mechanics and applied once, to the one reality, with its scope extended to the lifeworld; she rejects both reading it as an analogy and reading it as a template that quantum mechanics and other domains each instantiate | Jaksland (2024), LIT-1673, read in NOTE-1230, from Barad’s own statements (2007, 24 and 85, with her dismissals of analogy at 2007, 6, 7, 18, 24, 70 and 88). Active as a reading of what Barad holds, which is well supported by her text as quoted. It does not say that the conception she holds is sound: that rests on agential realism being correct as quantum mechanics, which Faye and Jaksland dispute (THEORY-1071). It does say that a use of her concepts outside physics by structural comparison is a use she disowns. | Active |
| THEORY-1086 | A fundamental metaphysics bears on the metaphysics of the lifeworld only through features that admit no approximation; without any, a relational world can approximate one of separable individuals, and the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is then real but contingent, on the size of Planck’s constant, not principled | Jaksland (2024), LIT-1673, read in NOTE-1230, reconstructing an argument Barad “only ever alludes to”. It is a conditional and the author leaves its antecedent open: whether any ontological feature is all-or-nothing is “an open question”. He finds individualism “immediately more agreeable” as approximable, and the dualisms the harder case. The contingency half is argued (a counterfactual on Planck’s constant); the no-approximation half is a candidate list, not a demonstration. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1112 | Perceiving people as a group entity, rather than as members of a common category, requires detecting or inferring collective intentionality among them; similarity, and categorization into an equivalence class, yields interchangeable members but not a group | Skorich (2025, v2 2026), LIT-1765, a preprint. Categorization with accentuation makes members interchangeable, not one, since a category is a set and a set is internally differentiated. Groups such as orchestras and families need no similarity. Groups are holistic entities perceived from cues to shared mental states, much as faces are perceived from configuration. Reported support: four experiments under review in which groups defined by a mental state (a chosen T-shirt colour; seeing the duck or the rabbit) drew more favouritism and tracking than groups defined by a physical property. Proposed: the argument is conceptual and the evidence is unpublished. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1115 | A we-identity, being one of us, can arise through mutual individualization, in which members grasp one another as non-substitutable and complementary, without depersonalization, as in long friendships and romantic partnerships; so depersonalization is not necessary for a we-identity | León (2023), LIT-1721. Self-categorization theory claims depersonalization as “the basic process underlying group phenomena”, for groups of any size, friendship groups included (Turner et al. 1987, pp. 50, 103, as quoted), and phenomenologists have taken it as the account of the “we”. But close relationships yield we-identities while their members grasp each other as non-substitutable, and relationship research on couple resilience finds the “we” more adaptive the more differentiated the “I”. Proposed: the argument is conceptual, and the cited evidence was not analysed by the source or read here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1247 | Griesemer and Shavit propose, as a first and rough sketch, that a collective becomes a new level of individuality only when collaboration toward a shared goal, rather than coordination or cooperation, organizes it, some core interactions have become generatively entrenched, and it has organizational closure, and that such a community can be reproduced only by exporting an organized sample of its roles and interactions, not of its members alone | What Griesemer and Shavit’s sketch proposes. The twenty-fourth status review split it from THEORY-418 (ADR-065 §3), so that the record holds the reading of the proposal apart from the proposal. The paper was read in full (NOTE-173), so the reading is held. Whether the proposal is right is THEORY-418, Proposed, which extends this entry. That needs criteria that sort real groups into the three grades, and worked cases. The paper’s two headline claims, non-circularity and individuality as a special case of collectivity, are in its abstract only and are not part of this entry. | Active |
| THEORY-1277 | Persons and organizations can be described not as successive stages, with the collective built up from individuals, but as coexisting levels of ordering through which one action propagates, each preserving its components; on that description the problem of scaling up from individual to organizational action does not arise | Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922, read in NOTE-1483, with Bencherki (2017), LIT-1901. The claim behind the parent paper’s dissolution of the scaling-up problem (LIT-1902, p. 1364). Proposed: a conceptual proposal, illustrated by one meeting excerpt, with no criterion that fixes a level independently of the analyst. It redescribes the problem; it does not show that aggregation never occurs. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1278 | Communication can be treated as transduction, the continuity of an action through processes that it transforms, rather than as exchange between parties; meaning is then the contribution an action makes, in retrospect, to a joint individuation, coexisting meanings mark concurrent individuations, and the problem of scaling agency from individual to collective is claimed to dissolve | Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, read in NOTE-1484, pp. 1355–1358 and 1363–1365. Simondon’s transduction made into a theory of organizational communication. Proposed: argued from examples, with the dissolution of scaling up asserted. The examples (a synapse, a hunger pang, a piston) show the notion applies to any change, which is its strength as a vocabulary and its weakness as a theory. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1279 | Organizational categories are radially structured, so applying them to nonprototypical cases extends and changes them; this is one source of continuous change in routine organizational action | Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, pp. 573–575, read in NOTE-1489. The paper’s mechanism for organizational becoming, built on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s prototype theory and Hart’s penumbra of legal rules. Proposed: it is supported by illustrative cases, not tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1280 | Agency can be redescribed without agents, as the affective force by which one individuation process takes up another’s excess action in a communicative event and both pass from a lesser to an augmented ability to act; agents are then effects of such events, and the absence of the force is disindividuation | Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, read in NOTE-1484, pp. 1349–1357. The paper’s central proposal, after the Spinozan formula for affect that Massumi offers as a proposition, not a definition, and Simondon’s individuation. Proposed: argued, and illustrated by one reanalysed meeting. It has no criterion that would let an observation count against it, and it builds the augmenting direction into the definition of agency. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1284 | Organization is a secondary accomplishment of change: change in organizations is continuous, as actors reweave their webs of beliefs and habits to accommodate new experience, and organization is both the attempt to stabilize that flux and the pattern that emerges from it | Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, read in NOTE-1489. The thesis of organizational becoming, which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 (LIT-1902) say their theory parallels. Proposed: it is argued from process philosophy and illustrated from others’ ethnographies. The change it describes is carried by human actors, not agent-free. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1285 | Organizational action can be described as pre-individual, so that whose action it is, a person’s or an organization’s, is an outcome of the individuations it is allowed to contribute to rather than a given; an action then has as many significations as the individuations it takes part in, and a person whose action is refused a collective’s recognition experiences that as disindividuation | Bencherki (2017), LIT-1901, read in NOTE-1482, with Bencherki & Iliadis (2021), LIT-1922. The proposal of which Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy’s “agency without agents” (LIT-1902) is a development. Proposed: argued, and illustrated by three excerpts from one documentary. Nothing identifies disindividuation apart from the affect it is inferred from, and the account needs, but disclaims, a standard of whose action it rightly was. | Proposed |