Agency as Communal, Participative, Promiscuous, and Protean: Implications for Social Movement Organizing

• In Event: On the Various Ways of Studying Agency in Organizational Communication: A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

Agency is one of the most (over)theorized concepts in social theory for good reason; it underlies and emerges from most propositions about meaningful action, social change, and communicative praxis. In this essay, I develop a communicative conception of agency rooted in Campbell’s (2005) treatment of agency as communal, participative, promiscuous, and protean. I enliven this conception in the context of social movement organizing, reading Campbell’s notion of agency both with and against the communicative labour of contemporary social movements, and particularly with reference to (a) political opportunities and mobilizing in social movements (Gamson & Meyer, 1996); and (b) the highly problematized material outcomes of these movements (Kolb, 2007).

Author

• Shiv Ganesh, Massey University