Contribution
A “strong process” theory of agency for organization studies, in answer to Hernes’s “How can there be agency without agents?” (epigraph, p. 1349). Agency is not “the capacity to act” of an actor (p. 1350) but “the affective force, expressed as a communicative event, that governs the transition from one process of individuation to another” (abstract). It works by sharing “excess action” (p. 1351).
Key insight
The definition adapts the Spinozan formula for affect that Massumi takes from Deleuze: “a power to affect and be affected [that] governs a transition, where a body passes from one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation” (Massumi 2015, quoted p. 1353). The paper keeps only the augmenting direction for agency: “we define agency as the affective force that governs the transition from a lesser to an augmented ability to act” (p. 1354). The diminishing direction becomes “lack of agency”, which “may induce a process of disindividuation” (p. 1351).
Assumptions
- Process ontology. There are “no already-constituted human beings prior to communication/becoming” (p. 1357).
- Simondon’s metastable systems. Every being is metastable, with regions organized at different energy densities, and individuation resolves the “disparities” between them through communication (p. 1355).
- Equivalence. Communication, affect, agency and becoming are equivalent, which the paper finds pointed to by Whitehead, Bateson and Massumi (p. 1354).
Key results
The paper’s results are conceptual.
- Excess action. Agency occurs when one individuation process takes up “the excess action of another individuation process (the feelings you cannot deal with, unchanneled energy, skills in search of an outlet, etc.)”. Sharing that burden “may achieve greater unity and lead to a greater capacity to act for each” (p. 1351).
- Transindividuation and disindividuation. Processes that share action may start a collective process, transindividuation, said to be “essential to organizational becoming” (abstract). When the sharing fails, the result is disindividuation, “the experience of needing to reorganize in order to deal with a preindividual element that resists incorporation” (p. 1356).
- Communication as transduction. Communication is “the continuity of action through beings who are in a perpetual state of becoming” (p. 1364), and every communication is a transformation (p. 1356). Meaning is retrospective: “action contributes to informing a system that, retrospectively, gives that action its meaning” (p. 1357).
- Scaling up dissolves. The problem of scaling from individual to collective agency “is only relevant … when communication is regarded as an interaction between already-existing agents, operating at different levels, and vanishes the moment communication is viewed eventfully” (p. 1364).
- Perspectivism. “Agency is a matter of perspective or perspectivism … Who or what has agency is a premature question” (p. 1357). Describing action from a human starting point is “an ‘agential cut’” (Barad), an analytical choice.
Claims
- Method (pp. 1357–1358). Study “dividuals”, not individuals. “Start in the middle”. Do not rely on participants’ understandings, since “Research that is grounded in people’s understandings is unable to attune to the processual nature of the world”. Organizational becoming is not the reduction of equivocality (against Weick): “Coexisting meanings of the same action indicate that several individuations are ongoing” (p. 1358).
- Responsibility (pp. 1366–1367). Responsibility is reframed as a duty toward “lesser existences” whose individuation is precarious, after Lapoujade and Jonas. The authors answer the charge that agency without agents is apolitical: “process philosophy reveals its political and critical potential” (p. 1366).
Method
Reanalysis of a published excerpt of Cooren’s (2018) ethnography of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2005 (pp. 1359–1363). Two local health officials ask Robert, an MSF representative, for MSF’s surgeon to train Congolese physicians. Robert hesitates and says “MSF we are not a university”. He then works his way to accepting an informal version: “at first sight, I don’t have major objections” (line 75).
- What is new. The authors rewatched the video to add nonverbal detail, and they extend the transcript past where Cooren stopped (lines 68–76).
- The reading. The request is excess action of the health department’s transindividuation. Robert’s pauses and averted gaze are disindividuation. His monologue reorganizes MSF so that both can continue. Robert is “not an agent, but a vector of becoming” (p. 1364).
Concepts
- Individuation. The processual emergence of physical, technical, psychological and collective entities.
- The preindividual. The source of an individuation’s energy.
- Excess action, or affective exaggeration. Action a process cannot incorporate, which pushes it to reach beyond itself.
- Transduction. Communication as transformation.
- Transindividuation. Collective individuation.
- Disindividuation. Interrupted individuation.
- Field of relation. A being in becoming; some fields are dense and hard to reorganize, others loose and easy.
- Inflection. “the pure Event”, after Deleuze (p. 1361).
Connections
- Hernes. The paper extends Hernes’s process account of agency by specifying the communication he leaves untheorized (p. 1353).
- Cooren. It positions itself against Cooren’s ventriloquism and the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) tradition, which “still tend[s] to entify agents” (p. 1364). The paper credits that verdict to Wilhoit 2016, who does not make it (see below).
- Barad. It borrows the agential cut, held in the record as LIT-1653, Unavailable, and read in THEORY-1083 and THEORY-1071.
- Simondon. The source is Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, which the record holds as LIT-1648, Unavailable. The paper’s reading of Simondon descends from Bencherki 2017 (LIT-1901), Bencherki & Iliadis 2021 (LIT-1922) and Iliadis 2013 (LIT-1911), all read.
Bearing on the record
-
CLAIM-355 is the record’s form of “agency without agents”. It holds that a distributed agent’s response can be real while the single owner a self-description attributes it to is a representational construction. The paper reaches a stronger conclusion: there are no agents prior to communication at all. It does so without CLAIM-355’s distinction between the binding, which is real, and its attribution, which is constructed.
-
CLAIM-418 holds that perspectival, agential and institutional boundaries need not coincide. The paper’s “agency is a matter of perspective” is a version of it. But the paper does not say what makes one cut better than another. CLAIM-405 says individuation is relative to a criterion without being arbitrary, which the paper’s perspectivism leaves open.
-
CLAIM-430 is closest to the reanalysis. An interaction can make available a way of relating that takes part before the reinterpretation it later seems to express. Robert discovering that MSF already teaches is that pattern.
-
CLAIM-515’s four questions, which the paper does not separate.
- “Augmented ability to act” is a change in capability, CLAIM-515’s exercisable.
- Its source in “excess action” is a mechanism, CLAIM-515’s realized.
- Its continuation through transindividuation is maintenance.
The paper treats all three as one event.
-
CLAIM-523. The responsibility section, a duty to processes whose individuation is precarious, presupposes a standard for which processes should continue. CLAIM-523 holds that legibility, efficacy and correctability do not supply one. The paper’s agency is defined by augmentation, so it builds a valence into the definition.
The sources, read (2026-10-31)
The works the paper leans on were looked for and, where a lawful copy was reached, read. Here is what they show about the paper’s use of them.
-
Massumi. The paper’s quotation is exact (Massumi & McKim 2009, p. 1, LIT-1905). But Massumi offers the formula as “the second part of the Spinozan definition taken up by Deleuze”, “a proposition” rather than “a general definition that you can apply” (p. 3) (THEORY-1282). The formula runs both ways, toward diminished or augmented capacitation. Keeping only augmentation for agency is the authors’ own move.
-
Massumi on transmission. Massumi holds that affect “is not a content that can be transported from one event to another… an event logic, not a logic of transmission or communication” (2009, p. 9), and that bodies cued by one event are “differentially attuned” (THEORY-1286). The paper’s “excess action” that “passes” between processes (p. 1356), and its indignation that “spills over”, read as transfer. Its definition of communication as transduction narrows the gap without closing it.
-
Massumi’s co-patterning (2017, p. 64, LIT-1910) is quoted exactly. For Massumi it is micropolitics’ aim, “an affirmation of discord” (THEORY-1283). The paper makes it a description of organizational becoming, softened by “attempting”.
-
Hernes. The epigraph is Hernes stating a reader’s objection (“Some readers may object… ‘How can there be agency without agents?’”). The paper twice cites it as something Hernes “pointed out” (pp. 1358, 1363). The book itself (LIT-1916) is Unavailable, and the passage was not checked in context.
-
Tsoukas & Chia 2002 (LIT-1913, read). The “parallel” the paper claims (p. 1351) holds for process coming before organization. It does not hold for process coming before agents. In Tsoukas & Chia, change is carried by “actors … conceived as webs of beliefs and habits of action that keep reweaving” through “the intrinsically human ability to be reflexive” (p. 575), and organization emerges “through the ongoing agency of organizational members” (p. 579) (THEORY-1284).
-
Wilhoit 2016 (LIT-1923, read) does not say what the paper attributes to it.
- The paper says (pp. 1363–1364) that Wilhoit noted Cooren’s analyses “still tend to entify agents”.
- Wilhoit’s point is methodological. The Montréal School’s commitment to interaction makes conversation analysis its method, so ventriloquism is “a more unified than dialogic metamodel” (pp. 45–46) (THEORY-1281).
- She does not discuss entification.
-
Bencherki 2017 (LIT-1901, read) is the paper’s direct ancestor. Several things are already there:
- action prior to its authors;
- disindividuation;
- personal individuation continuing into collective individuation;
- “concurrent significations”, which become “coexisting meanings” here (THEORY-1285).
The 2024 paper adds Massumi’s affect, “excess action” and the event. Its “action differential” is from Bencherki & Iliadis 2021 (LIT-1922).
-
Loose citations.
-
Omitted doubt. Letiche & Moriceau 2017 (LIT-1915, abstract only) call transduction “very problematic”. They say it “would seem to escape the individual and/or collective will – becoming an all-important life-force outside political or ethical control”. The paper takes their description without that worry, which bears directly on its own section on responsibility.
-
Not read. Unavailable: Cooren 2018 (LIT-1914), the source of the reanalysed excerpt; Cooren & Fairhurst 2009 (LIT-1912), whose “scaling up” the paper rejects; and Bencherki & Cooren 2011 (LIT-1917). So the paper’s contrasts with them are unchecked.
Limitations
- No independent criterion. Nothing identifies “excess action”, “augmented ability to act” or “disindividuation” apart from the analyst’s reading of the episode. In the reanalysis they are inferred from pauses, gaze and hesitations, and the analysis leans on supposition: “we may suppose that he knows his refusal will disrupt the individuation of the physicians-in-becoming” (p. 1362); “Assuming that on line 14, Robert is about to express a refusal” (p. 1362). No observation is described that would count against the account.
- The reanalysis attributes inner states to individuals. It cites Robert’s knowledge, surprise and discomfort, which is the entitative description the paper rejects. The authors concede that the reanalysis “still bears traces of entitative thinking” (p. 1364).
- The equivalence risks vacuity. If a piston “communicates movement” (p. 1364) and every being-in-becoming is a field of relation, then “communication” and “agency” apply to everything that changes. This is the broad horn of the dilemma the record filed against its own normative thesis (CLAIM-512). The organizational description has to add discrimination to earn its place.
- Valence is defined in. Agency is the transition to augmented ability only; diminution is its “lack”. So whether an event shows agency depends on a prior judgment of which ability matters and whose. The paper does not supply that judgment.
- Perspectivism and realism pull against each other. “Agency is a matter of perspective” (p. 1357) sits uneasily with agency as “coextensive with the very process of becoming” (p. 1354). The paper does not reconcile the two.
Open questions
- Whether “excess action” can be operationalized: for instance, as demand on a process that exceeds its capacity, measured independently of how the encounter resolves.
- Whether transindividuation predicts anything that interaction analysis of the same episode does not.
- What methods would let researchers “individuate into” what they study (p. 1366). The authors leave this open.
Bearing on the record’s own argument
Added 2026-10-31 by a pass connecting the readings of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 and the works it leans on to the record’s lines. Analogies are marked as such.
Pragmatic transport
-
CLAIM-002. Communication as “the continuity of action through beings” (p. 1364) is CLAIM-002’s continuity of transmission taken without similarity of function. That is why the piston example makes it cover every causal continuity. Structure, not mechanism.
-
CLAIM-171 and CLAIM-160. Two passages are a systemic form of CLAIM-171’s position, and stronger than it, since they leave no slot for intended meaning:
- “action contributes to informing a system that, retrospectively, gives that action its meaning” (p. 1357);
- the refusal of “people’s understandings” (p. 1358).
They do not answer CLAIM-171’s open point.
-
CLAIM-226. “Coexisting meanings of the same action indicate that several individuations are ongoing” (p. 1358) holds that disagreement is structured. The paper gives no model of it.
-
CLAIM-496. Rejecting the reduction of equivocality (p. 1358) is incoherence without failure. CLAIM-496, with CLAIM-259, supplies the task-relative criterion the paper lacks.
-
CLAIM-525 places in the line’s terms the paper’s two senses of information (p. 1357) and its “dense” fields that “remain mostly unaffected” (pp. 1356–1357). They belong to the line’s interpreter channel and change of cover.
-
QUESTION-130. Not an answer: transduction counts there as state evolution, not transport.
Distributed agency and individuation
- CLAIM-418, corrected. “Agency is a matter of perspective” (p. 1357) is the analyst’s agential cut, not TERM-072’s organizational perspective. The bullet above calling it “a version of” CLAIM-418 over-reads it (ARG-047, Rejected). Its neighbour is CLAIM-405, whose criterion the paper leaves unfixed.
- Scaling up. The claim that it “vanishes the moment communication is viewed eventfully” (p. 1364) holds for the aggregation of agents only. Whether an organization-level variable is closed against its realization stays decidable without agents (CLAIM-526, resting on CLAIM-388 and CLAIM-386).
- Spillover or shared cue. “her anger spills over into her inert colleagues” (p. 1354) is coupling. Massumi’s account (THEORY-1286) is a common cue with differential response. The record’s question on this is QUESTION-063.
- CLAIM-430. The MSF reanalysis (pp. 1362–1363) is CLAIM-430’s invitation with the order reversed: Robert redescribes MSF’s existing practice so that he can take part.
- TERM-086. “Augmented ability to act” is an organizational achievement with no target named. TERM-086 requires a target, which is the missing answer to “whose capacity counts”.
- QUESTION-281. The paper’s “metastable” (p. 1355, where crystals are “relatively stable” and start-ups “less stable”) is heterogeneity, not the locally stable state of the nucleation route. Disindividuation (pp. 1356, 1365) names the passing-away of forms without giving it any dynamics.
Will-organization, organizational affect and authenticity
- Agency here is a change in what can be done, not will-organization.
- “Augmented ability to act” (p. 1354) falls on the reach side of CLAIM-352’s split.
- CLAIM-354 makes the comparison it needs partial. Without a declared measure, the MSF outcome (pp. 1362–1363) is a change, not an augmentation.
- CLAIM-527 separates this quantity from Frijda’s emotion and from the potential account’s valence.
- The marks of conflict. Robert’s pause, gaze and reversal (pp. 1362–1363) are the marks CLAIM-484 names. The paper reads them as disindividuation, so the marks do not discriminate between the two readings (see the note on CLAIM-484).
- An outward route for internal conflict. The climate-urge example (p. 1356) and “excess action” (p. 1351) settle a conflict by placing the demand in a collective. This is QUESTION-365, beside CLAIM-358’s local and escalated routes. It is also the personal form of QUESTION-364.
- The supposition denied. “No already-constituted human beings” (p. 1357) denies CLAIM-080’s supposition without reaching the will account. The reanalysis brings the agent back (p. 1364).
- Responsibility (pp. 1366–1367). A duty “to foster each being-in-becoming”, grounded in mutual dependence:
- is the inference CLAIM-075 disclaims, and the step QUESTION-007 records as “interdependence ⇏ obligation”;
- offers prescription as the judgment itself, which CLAIM-518 separates and CLAIM-512’s broad horn meets;
- treats responsibility as incorporation, without the justification step CLAIM-523 names.
- “Felt” (p. 1363) is meant in Massumi’s sense, which CLAIM-439 would call unfelt.
Nucleating argument and formal apparatus
- The method (p. 1366) and the record as apparatus. Simondon’s “following the being in its genesis, in accomplishing the genesis of thought at the same time as the genesis of the object” (Simondon 2020, p. 14, quoted) is a constitutive template beside Barad’s for CLAIM-476.
- It needs no quantum premise, and it claims more than CLAIM-476 or CLAIM-470 allow.
- It derives no consequence beyond CLAIM-469’s operational facts.
- QUESTION-366 asks whether knowing an object, and not only revising beliefs about it, needs the inquiry’s own history.
- The record’s workbench, history notes and decision-recorded grammar revisions (CASE-178) are a worked case of the methods the paper asks for.
- Two senses of the agential cut. At p. 1357 the cut is “but an analytical choice”; at p. 1366 researchers are “individuating into others”. See TERM-087’s note of 2026-10-31. This is the source of the tension between perspectivism and realism noted under Limitations.
- Crystals. The paper’s crystals are “densely assembled” fields that “cannot be reorganized easily” (pp. 1355–1357). That is the formed crystal, CLAIM-184’s entrenchment. Simondon’s crystal, growing in a metastable solution, is CLAIM-185’s anchoring.
- Disindividuation (pp. 1356, 1365) has the structure of CLAIM-419’s third outcome, a misfit answered by reorganizing. Analogy only.
- Coexisting meanings (p. 1358).