Agency and organization: Toward a cyborg- consciousness

Journal/Book: Hum Relat. 1998; 51: 233 Spring St, New York, NY 10013. Plenum Publ Corp. 1209-1226.

Abstract: The presumption that agency is primarily the function or personification of a naturalized human actant can be traced through a Western intellectual tradition which draws upon a dualistic conception of the self as a unified, productive, sovereign subject, and an independent, external, physical other. In this paper, I problematize the prevalence of such Cartesian differentiation. I review an alternative, postfoundational actant ontology, then trace the resemblances in the work on situated knowledges. These orientations challenge the hierarchical division between the internal self and the external other and instead emphasize the relational, material, and performative nature of human being. Drawing on the notion of proximal thinking, I suggest that formal organizations can productively be described as relational spaces, containing multiple and complex frontiers, frames and interfaces, with(in) which ostensibly differentiated and individualistic attitudes toward agency give way to the variety and possibility of the self-in-between; a cyborg-consciousness able to withstand the tension of partial identities and contradictory voices.

Note: Article Wood M, Univ Warwick, Warwick Business Sch, Coventry CV4 7AL, W Midlands, ENGLAND

Keyword(s): actant ontology; cyborg epistemology; postfoundationalism; proximal organizing; situated knowledges; SCIENCE

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