Agency
3 Jun 2024
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Castle Teaching Room (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Organisational Theory and Information Systems Seminar
Speaker: Professor Theodore R Schatzki, University of Kentucky
About the seminar topic
This essay analyses agency and aims thereby to reinvigorate what its author calls “residual humanism”. Part one begins by differentiating three kinds of agency: acting, doing, and effecting. It shows that acting is a specification of doing and that acting and doing instantiate effecting. This makes causality the core of the idea of agency. The discussion also emphasises the need to uphold differences between different concretisations of doing and effecting. Part 2 disambiguates and examines the scope and validity of 4 prominent claims contained in the idea that agential effecting is tied to combinations of entities and events. The integrity of agency as a reflection of the noun-verb structure of language is also defended. The essay’s theoretical contentions are illustrated through multiple examples of people and technology, including contemporary digital technology.
Speaker bio
Theodore Schatzki is Professor of Geography and Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Until September 2024 he is also Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Schatzki earned a BA in applied mathematics from Harvard University and graduate degrees in philosophy from Oxford University and UC Berkeley.
Professor Schatzki’s research interests lie in theorising social life. He is widely recognised for his contributions to the contemporary stream of social analysis called practice theory, which is active today in multiple disciplines. Schatzki is the author of 5 single-authored monographs, the co-editor of 6 collected volumes, and responsible for almost 90 articles — and a slew of other pieces — on a wide range of topics in philosophy and social theory. Recent work concerns the digital shaping of associations, the notions of space needed to analyse digitalised social phenomena, and (with R Friedland) a practice institutional analysis of blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and platforms. He is also cofounder and co-organiser of a lively international online practice theory community.
A 2021 study based on the Scopus index listed Professor Schatzki as the 13th most cited philosopher in the world in 2020. He will spend the first half of 2025 at the University of Bristol as a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor.
Register
If you would like to register, or know more about this event, please email Luke Slater.