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LIT-1902: Agency Without Agents: Affective Forces, Communicative Events, and Organizational Becomings

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1484), from the version of record the owner supplied. The publisher's copy is open access (CC BY-NC 4.0) and a copy is deposited in R-libre (TÉLUQ). This client could not fetch either: SAGE and CORE served a bot check, and the repository reset every connection. Worth reading as the clearest statement in organization studies of agency without agents, built on Simondon's individuation and Massumi's affect. It is a conceptual proposal whose empirical illustration is a reanalysis, not a test.
Tagsindividuation, agency, social-ontology, social-science
Cited as “grounds” byARG-044 — The MSF meeting reanalysed by Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy shows that an interaction can make available a way of relating its participants did not hold, and names the condition under which it lasts; it does not show that taking part comes before the reinterpretation, ARG-049 — The pauses, averted gaze and reversal in the MSF transcript show internal conflict as a gap between the precedence a motive claims and the authority it is granted
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1484 — Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy — Agency without agents
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-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, 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

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Bencherki, N., Brummans, B. H. J. M., & Vézy, C. (2024). Agency without agents: Affective forces, communicative events, and organizational becomings. Organization Studies, 45(9), 1349–1372. doi:10.1177/01708406241266310.

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Why this is here

Filed at the owner’s request. The paper is the organization-studies form of a thesis the record holds in its own terms. CLAIM-355 holds that a distributed agent’s response can be real while its single owner is a representational construction. CLAIM-418 holds that perspectives, agencies and institutions need not coincide. The paper draws on Simondon, whose Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (LIT-1648) the record could not obtain, so this is the record’s first reading of Simondon’s individuation, at second hand. Its account of agency as the transition to an “augmented ability to act” sits beside the record’s account of capabilities (CLAIM-475) and of normative efficacy (CLAIM-523). It does not separate the four questions of CLAIM-515: recoverable, exercisable, realized, maintainable. The record’s reading of it (THEORY-1280, THEORY-1278) is that it is a vocabulary for redescription, not yet a theory with tests.

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