What is Agency?

Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Miscbe

Center for Studies of Social Change
January 1995

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Structure, Action, and Agency
   - Agency in contemporary social theory
   - Agency and the temporal-relational contexts of action
   - The "chordal triad" of agency
   

3. The Iterational Dimension of Agency
   - Iteration: the history of a concept
   - The internal structure of iteration
   - Iteration in empirical research
   

4. The Projective Dimension of Agency
   - Projectivity: the history of a concept
   - The internal structure of projectivity
   - Projectivity in empirical research
   

5. The Practical-Evaluative Dimension of Agency
   - Practical evaluation: the history of a concept
   - The internal structure of practical evaluation
   - Practical evaluation in empirical research
   

6. Agentic Orientations and the Contexts of Action
   - Variations across structural contexts
   - Switches between structural contexts
   - Mediations of structural contexts
   

7. Conclusion

8. References

Acknowledgments

We thank Perry Chang, Sharon Cooley, Jeff Goodwin, Calvin Morrill, Michael Muhlhaus, Shepley Orr, and Mimi Sheller for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

 

Introduction

The concept of agency has become a source of increasing strain and confusion in social thought. Variants of action theory, normative theory, and political-institutional analysis have defended, attacked, buried, and resuscitated the concept in often contradictory and overlapping ways. At the center of the debate, the term "agency" itself has maintained an elusive, albeit resonant, vagueness; it has given rise to a long list of associated (and often equally vague) terms, such as selthood, motivation, will, purposiveness, intentionality, choice, initiative, freedom, and creativity. Yet despite the growing numbers of recent theorists -- ranging from Jeffrey Alexander, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu to Jurgen Habermas and James Coleman -- who have addressed the so-called "structure and agency problem," the concept of agency itself has been surprisingly neglected. In the struggle to demonstrate the interpenetration of agency and structure, most theorists have failed to distinguish agency as an analytical category in its own right -- with distinctive theoretical dimensions and temporally variable social manifestations. The result has been a flat and impoverished conception that, when it escapes the abstract voluntarism of rational choice theory, tends to remain so tightly bound to structure that one loses sight of the different ways in which agency actually shapes social action.

In this essay, we argue that each of the most significant recent attempts to retheorize agency has neglected crucial dimensions of the concept. "Theorists of practice" (Ortner 1984) such as Bourdieu and Giddens, for example, have given one-sided attention to the role of "habitus" and routinized practices; rational choice theorists such as James Coleman, on the other hand, have stressed interest and purpose; while normative theorists such as Jurgen Habermas have emphasized deliberation and judgment. While routine, purpose, and judgment all constitute important dimensions of agency, none by itself truly captures its full complexity. Moreover, when one or another is conflated with agency itself, we lose a sense of the dynamic interplay among these dimensions, and of how this interplay varies within different structural contexts of action.

Our immediate aims in this article, then, are threefold: (1) to analytically disaggregate agency into its several component elements (even though these are clearly interrelated empirically); (2) to demonstrate the different ways in which the dimensions of agency interpenetrate with diverse forms of structure; and (3) to point out the implications of such a differentiated concept of agency for empirical research.

Theoretically, our central contribution is to begin to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its "iterational" or habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). The agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity, we argue, if it is analytically situated within the "duree" or flow of temporality. (We are deeply indebted here to the two theoretical traditions of classical American pragmatism and continental phenomenology.) More radically, we also argue that the structural contexts of action are themselves "fields of temporality" -- multiple, overlapping, and crisscrossing ways of ordering time toward which social actors can assume different simultaneous agentic orientations. Since social actors are embedded within many such temporalities at once, they can be said to be oriented toward the past, the present, and the future at any given moment, albeit primarily only to one or another of these within any one temporal field. As actors move within and among these different contexts, they switch between temporal orientations (as constructed within and by means of those contexts), and thus are capable of changing their relationship to structure. We claim that in examining changes in agentic orientation, we gain crucial analytical leverage for charting varying degrees of maneuverability, inventiveness, and reflective choice shown by social actors in relation to the constraining and enabling contexts of action.

Most broadly, our guiding concerns in this paper are normative and practical in nature. We contend that reconceptualizing agency as an internally complex temporal dynamic makes possible a new perspective upon the age-old problem of structure and action. How are social actors, we ask, capable (at least in principle) of critically evaluating and transforming the conditions of their own lives? If "structural contexts" are analytically separate from (and stand over against) capacities for "human agency," how is it possible for actors ever to mediate or to transform these oppositions? (In this respect, too, we are deeply indebted to the American pragmatists, with their abiding suspicion of all taken-for-granted dualisms.) Without disaggregating the agency concept into its most important analytical dimensions, we cannot ever hope to find satisfactory answers to these questions. The key to grasping the dynamic possibilities of human agency is to view it as composed of variable (and changing) orientations within the flow of time. Only then will it be clear how the structural environments of action are both dynamically sustained by and also altered through human agency --by actors capable of formulating projects for the future and realizing them, even if only in small part, and with unforeseen outcomes, in the present. ₁

 

Structure, Action, and Agency

Many of the tensions in present-day conceptions of human agency can be traced back to the Enlightenment debate over whether instrumental rationality or transcendental values are the truest expression of human freedom and agency. Teleological and instrumentalist conceptions of action fueled the philosophical individualism of the early Enlightenment and the subsequent "invention" of the individual as a "free agent" able to make rational choices for (him)self and society (Lukes 1973). With John Locke's (1978) rejection of the binding power of tradition, his location of beliefs in individual experience, and his grounding of society in the "social contract" between individuals, we receive a sweeping affirmation of the capacity of human beings to shape the circumstances in which they live. This faith subsequently sustained a long line of utilitarian thinkers including Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, and embedded agency in an individualist and calculative conception of action that underlies Western cultural accounts of freedom and progress.

"human agency," how is it possible

In response to the utilitarian association of freedom with self-interest, Kant offers an opposing view of freedom as normatively grounded individual will, governed by the "categorical imperative" rather than by material necessity (or interest). In support of this view, Kant bifurcates all of reality into two opposing orders; the conditional and the normative, necessity and freedom -- the latter conceived of as the pure, unconditioned activity of autonomous moral beings. (We shall see in a later section of this paper, on the other hand, how even Kant points the way -- through his doctrine of aesthetic judgment -- toward an overcoming of these theoretical dualisms.) His rendering of the ancient question of free will vs. necessity becomes in classical sociological theory the point of departure for a concern with non-rational, norm-oriented action -- in contradistinction to the rational, instrumental action emphasized by economistic analysts of society (Habermas 1984/89; Munch 1981, 1994). In Hans Joas's words, "As a safeguard against the utilitarian dangers of the theory of rational action, the founding theorists of sociology [had] recourse to Kant and his notion of free, moral action" (Joas 1993, p.247). Talcott Parsons argues in The Structure of Social Action (1968), for example, that "conditions may be conceived at one pole, ends and normative rules at another, means and effort as the connecting link between them" (Parsons 1968, p.732). Agency, for Parsons, is expressed through the notion of effort, as the force that achieves, in Kantian terminology, the interpenetration of means-ends rationality and categorical obligation.

Parsons's early attempts to address the temporal dimension of action (subsequently discarded in his more systematic work) also remain caught within Kantian dualisms. He notes that all social actions, whether instrumental or normative, are "teleological" in structure: "[A]n act is always a process in time.... The concept end always implies a future reference, to a state which is either not yet in existence, and which would not come into existence if something were not done about it by the actor" (Parsons 1968, p.45). In none of his writings, on the other hand, does he elaborate a fully temporal theory of agency (or of structure): agency remains too far "outside" of time (as in Kant's own conceptionof the "unconditioned"), while structure remains a spatial category rather than (also) a temporal construction. Moreover, in none of his writings does Parsons devote much systematic attention to disaggregating the crucial concept of effort itself -- to opening up the "black box" of human agency. It is these tasks that now stand as the preeminent challenges to theorists of social action, although, as we shall now see, precious few of these theorists have taken them up with satisfactory results.

Agency in contemporary social theory

The central preoccupation of certain currently influential approaches to the structure and agency problem has been to argue that the Kantian dichotomy between ideal and material realms is a false and misleading one. Despite important differences, many writers have converged upon the notion that this distinction -- together with parallel distinctions between free will and necessity, voluntarism and determinism, and subjectivism and objectivism -- must be replaced by an outlook that regards them as reciprocally constituting moments of a unified social process in time. In this vein, the seminal works of Bourdieu and Giddens provide a useful point of reference. Bourdieu commences one of his major treatises -- The Logic of Practice (1990) -- with the proposition that "Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism" (Bourdieu 1990, p.25). His own concepts of "habitus" and "field" provide a means for transcending precisely this dualism. Giddens, too, in The Constitution of Societv (1984) and other writings, proposes a "theory of structuration" in which structure and agency become mutually constitutive qience inseparable) elements. "Crucial to the idea of structuration is the theorem of the duality of structure... .The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality.... [T]he structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize." In Giddens's view, the "conceptual divide between subject and...object," so pervasive in social thought since at least Kant, can only be overcome through such a paradigm (Giddens 1984, pp.25; xx).

The notion of the "mutual constitution" of structure and agency has, without question, been a salutary and fruitful one for sociological investigation. It has made possible empirical research that underscores self-consciously both the causal significance of structure as the constraining and enabling conditions of action, and of praxis as "an active constituting process, accomplished by, and consisting in, the doings of active subjects" (Giddens 1976, p.121). The historical and ethnographic researches of Giddens (1981, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1992) and, especially, of Bourdieu (1977; 1984; 1988; 1993) bear ample testimony to the promise of this approach. The notion of mutual constitution has also highlighted the urgency of transcending the dichotomies at the heart of contemporary theory. And finally, both Bourdieu and Giddens have brought temporality back into the analytical debate in interesting and challenging ways. Precisely their strategy, however, has also brought in its train several theoretical disadvantages. Foremost among these has been a tendency toward what Margaret Archer (1982; 1988) terms the "fallacy of central conflation." ₂ Central conflationists such as Giddens (and here we would include Bourdieu as well) see structure as so closely intertwined with every aspect of practice that, for Archer, "the constituent components [of structure and agency] cannot be examined separately... .The intimacy of their interconnection denies even relative autonomy to the components involved. And in the absence of any degree of autonomy it becomes impossible to examine their interplay" (Archer 1988, pp.77; 80; see also Alexander 1994). ₃

What becomes eclipsed in the notion of the inseparability of structure and agency is the degree of changeability or mutability of different actual structures, as well as the variable (and changing) ways in which social actors relate to them. In most conflationist views, the constitutive relationship between actors and structures is held analytically constant. If, as Archer puts it, "the powers of Mephistopheles [structure] ultimately depend on Faustus [agency] continuing to invoke them," the constraining and enabling powers of specific actual structures cannot be determined. And correspondingly, if actors "are assumed to enjoy a constant degree of transformative freedom," then the circumstances under which one encounters "more voluntarism" or "more determinism" also cannot be specified (Archer 1988, pp.89-90). Archer's criticisms raise an important question with both analytical and normative implications for a theory of agency: in order to understand degrees of variability in the agency exercised by actors in relation to different structural contexts, we must ask whether the dualism of subject and object (or structure and agency) cannot be transcended in some other way, without short-circuiting the original distinction itself. The separation between structure and agency ought not to be read as a rigid and uncompromising dualism, but rather as an opposition that can be bridged in mediated fashion through the self-conscious, reflective, and creative activity of communicatively interacting subjects.

Significantly for us, one contemporary social theorist, Jeffrey Alexander (1988a), already points the way toward doing precisely that. Ironically a neo-Parsonian himself in many respects, and thus influenced in the deep structure of his thought by Kantian categories and dual isms ('1e continues to take as his frame of reference the dichotomy between the normative and the conditional), Alexander advances considerably beyond both Kant and Parsons (as well as Bourdieu and Giddens) in thematizing the ways in which human agency engages with its structural contexts. Indeed, Alexander is surely the only major social theorist today to engage so deliberately and systematically in disaggregating the concept of agency itself, in probing into its inner structure and delineating categories of agentic processes. In this respect, he provides a positive model and an inspiration for our own endeavors. Alexander proposes that action be conceived in terms of two basic dimensions, which he calls "interpretation" (further subdivided into "typification" and "invention") and "strategization." Alexander intends by these analytical categories to synthesize, as did Parsons before him, the rational-utilitarian and nonrational-normative perspectives on action.

In what follows, we make use of analogous categories ourselves in developing our theory of agency. (Aspects of Alexander's categories generally appear in all three of the major sections yet to come.) On the other hand, we diverge from Alexander in focusing upon aspects of agency that he himself largely neglects: specifically, its imaginative, future-oriented, and pragmatic dimensions (11ence again our indebtedness to American pragmatism). Alexander opens up theoretical space for analyzing these aspects of agency by means of his category of "invention," but his analysis remains subsumed under a broader category of normativity; and Alexander has relatively little to say about invention's constitutive features: "The creativity of individual or collective action finds no possibility of recognition and inclusion in Parsons's theory and in the immanent critique of that theory" (Joas 1993, p.209). Even more importantly, Alexander neglects to situate his analysis of human agency (or structure) within a specifically temporal framework. He fails to link agentic processes into the flow of time, the duree of temporal progression, even though agentic processes, as we shall see below, can only be understood if they are seen as linked intrinsically to temporality -- to fields of practice as ways of ordering time.

Agency and the temporal-relational contexts of action

The core of our argument in the pages that follow is a threefold distinction among the structural contexts of action, human agency, and empirical social action itself. Following Sorokin (1947), Parsons and Shils (1951), Alexander (1988b), and Barber (1992), we maintain that action takes place simultaneously within a plurality of "environments" or structural contexts -- specifically, those of culture, society, and social psychology -- which in turn are embodied in a multiplicity of institutional configurations or "fields of practice" (see Figure 1). These contexts (and fields) are not mere spatial orderings, or three-dimensional spaces, within which different architectures of cultural, societal, and psychological relations can be found, but also distinct temporalities themselves, or ways of ordering time (Mead 1932). While temporal-relational structural contexts of action (as embodied in fields of practice) influence and shape action and are (re-)shaped by it in turn, structure and agency cannot be said, in any direct and simple way, to be "mutually constitutive." The former is never so deeply intertwined in every aspect of the latter that these different analytical elements cannot be examined independently of one another. ₄

While our principal focus of attention in this article remains the different analytical dimensions of agency rather than action's structural contexts, it will be helpful by way of background to say a few brief words about the latter. The cultural environment, in our view, encompasses those symbolic patterns, structures, and formations (e.g., cultural discourses, narratives, and idioms, or conceptual networks" [Somers 1994]) that constrain and enable action by structuring actors' normative commitments and their understandings of their world and their possibilities within it (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Emirbayer and Mische 1995). The important point here is that each of these cultural formations has its own emergent properties, its own internal logic and organization, that requires careful analysis on its own terms. The societal environment or context, meanwhile, encompasses those network patterns of social ties (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994) that comprise a "relational setting" (Somers 1993) of action. It includes economic, political, as well as associational (including "public": see Emirbayer and Sheller 1995) networks of interaction. Finally, the psychological environment encompasses those affective structures that constrain and enable action by channeling actors' intrapsychic needs, desires, and impulses. It includes long-lasting, durable psychological formations such as dispositional patterns and character structures, as well as interpersonal structures of libidinal attachment, desire, and aggression (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1995). These three structural contexts of action intersect and overlap with one another within fields of practice, but are mutually autonomous; they designate relatively enduring patterns or matrices of relationships (ties) among symbols, positions, and objects (of a psychical sort), respectively. ₅

While deeply influenced and channelled by these three environments of culture, society, and social psychology, empirical social action is also profoundly shaped by the dynamic moment of human agency itself. Here it is important to be perfectly clearly about our analytical distinctions: empirical action is not, in our view, synonymous with human agency. For while the moment of human agency is present in all actual empirical instances of action, it must be understood as a theoretically distinct element. We concur with Alexander (1992) that the "identification of actor and agency" renders one "guilty of [the fallacy of] misplaced concreteness. Rather than replacing or reinterpreting the familiar dichotomy between actors and structures, [this] identification... actually reproduces it in another form.... [A]ctors per se are much more than, and [simultaneously] much less than, 'agents' [alone]" (pp.1-2). All empirical instances of action are shaped and conditioned, on the one hand, by the cultural, social, and psychological environments, and, on the other, by the dynamic moment of agency itself. The latter guarantees, in fact, that empirical action will never be completely determined or structured. ₆

Yet if agency is not synonomous with action, neither is it completely unconstrained by structural contexts. While human agency represents in our framework the possibility of distantiation from (and creative transfiguration of) received structures, agentic processes themselves assume diverse empirical forms depending upon the specific temporal-relational contexts within which they unfold. What we term "agentic orientations" vary (as we shall further elaborate below) according to the different cultural, social, and psychological contexts to which (and by means of which) they respond; these cross-cutting, temporally constructed configurations give form to "effort" and allow actors to assume greater or lesser degrees of transformative leverage (maneuver, recomposition, or consideration of alternatives) vis-à-vis their structural environments. (We might thereby speak of the "double constitution" of agency and structure; temporal-relational contexts support particular agentic orientations, which in turn constitute differing structuring relationships of actors toward their environments.) While actors have variable capacities to shape structural contexts, there is no hypothetical moment in which agency actually gets "free" of structure (it is not, in other words, some pure Kantian transcendental will).

What, then, is human agency? We define it in relational terms as the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments -- the temporal-relational contexts of action -- which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. ₇ This definition encompasses what we shall carefully distinguish below as the different constitutive elements of human agency: iteration, projection, and practical evaluation. It positions us as well in respect to ongoing debates within the social theory literature, as we shall see further below. And it provides us with the analytical resources to make good on our earlier promise to point the way toward a transcendence of the structure/agency dichotomy -- the dualism of free will and necessity -- in a mediated fashion. For in emphasizing variation and change in the temporal constitution of agentic orientations, we open up the possibility of conceiving of social actors' relations to their environments (or at least to some of their environments, some of the time) as entailing a creative, reflective, and collective solving of problems. While the division between subject and object ought not to be prematurely short-circuited in the manner proposed by Bourdieu and Giddens, it can, both in principle and in practice, be overcome through the individual or collective exercise of human capacities for iteration and, especially, for imagination and judgment.

The "chordal tijad" of agency

In the pages that follow, we distinguish analytically between three different dimensions of human agency. In broad terms, these dimensions correspond to the different temporal orientations of agency, allowing us to examine forms of action that are more oriented (respectively) to the past, the future, and the present. Since these three dimensions may also involve increasing capacities of reflectivity and conscious purpose, they additionally enable us to locate more precisely the interplay between the reproductive and transformative dimensions of social action.

• The first of these dimensions, which we term the iterational aspect, has received perhaps the most systematic attention in philosophy and sociological theory, particularly (in recent years) from that tradition of thought which one recent commentator (Ortner 1984) describes as "theories of practice." It refers to the selective reactivation by actors of past patterns of thought and action, as routinely incorporated in practical activity, thereby giving stability and order to social universes and helping to sustain identities, interactions, and institutions over time.
• The second dimension of agency, the projective element, has been largely neglected in recent social theory, although it does receive attention in the writings of Alfred Schutz and his followers, plus some pragmatist thinkers and, indirectly, rational choice theorists. Outside of sociology, glimmerings of concern with projectivity can also be found in such sources as phenomenological and existential philosophy, psychoanalysis, narrative psychology, and dramaturgic anthropology. Projectivity encompasses the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in relation to the actors' hopes, fears, and desires for the future.
• And finally, the practical-evaluative element of agency has been left strikingly undertheorized by sociologists, although many intimations of it can be found in a long tradition of moral philosophy extending from Aristotelian ethics to the writings of Jojin Dewey and Hannah Arendt, and including today such writers as Jurgen Habermas. It entails the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action, in response to the emerging demand dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations.

We should stress from the outset that these are analytical distinctions; all three of these constitutive dimensions of human agency are to be found, at least potentially, within any concrete empirical instance of action. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a "chordal triad" of agency ₈ (see Figure 2), in which all three dimensions resonate as separate but not always harmonious tones. On the other hand, we also claim that in any given case, one or another of these three aspects might well predominate. It is possible to speak of action that is more (or less) engaged with the past, more (or less) directed toward the future, and more (or less) responsive to the present. In each of the three major sections below, we isolate these various analytical dimensions, and examine the internal structure of each. Although it will never be possible to carry out our analytical dissections with surgical precision, we aim to show what agentic processes would entail were one or another of these tones in the chordal triad sounded most forcefully. ₉ It should be remembered, of course, that insofar as this is an analytical discussion, we also bracket for now the added complication that actors are always embedded within many different fields of practice (hence temporalities) at once, and thus may exhibit a projective orientation within one field, for example, even as they exhibit an iterational orientation within another, and so on. (We return to this issue in the final section of the paper.)

Moreover, we also argue that each of the three analytical dimensions can be said to possess its own "internal chordal triad." The three dimensions of agency that we describe do not correspond in any simple, exclusive way to past, present, and future as successive "stages" of action. We emphasize instead the nature of empirical social action as a duree or ongoing process, rather than as a sequentiality of discrete "acts" (Giddens 1984). As Figure 2 indicates (and as we explain in greater detail in the sections that follow), each of our dimensions of agency has itself a simultaneous, internal orientation to past, present, and future, for all forms of agency are temporally embedded in the flow of time. We do claim, however, that for each aspect of agency one temporal orientation is the dominant tone, shaping the way in which actors relate to the other two dimensions of time. Disaggregating the dimensions of agency (and exploring which orientations are dominant within a given situation) allows us to suggest, then, that projective orientations (to take one example) encompass as "minor tones" past- and present-orientations as well as a (primary) engagement with the future. In addition, as we discuss in the final section of this paper, this notion allows us to analyze variability and change in actors' orientations as they respond to the diverse and shifting environments around them.

Several further points of clarification are in order here. First, we must reaffirm that agency as we have sketched it above is a historically variable phenomenon, embedded in changing theoretical and practical conceptions of time and action. Ours is not, in other words, a universalist perspective that assumes that all times, places, and persons are equally iterational, projective, or evaluative. Rather, it is precisely the historical and cultural (as well as personal) variability of agentic orientations that make this framework so compelling. The way in which people understand (through embodied experience, linguistic constructions, and social organization) their own relationship to the past, present and future makes a difference to their actions; changing conceptions of agentic possibility in relation to fields of practices profoundly influence the ways in which actors in different periods and places see their worlds as more or less responsive to human imagination, purpose, and effort.

Second, we argue that the different dimensions of agency represent varying degrees of inventiveness and reflectivity in relation to action and its temporal-relational contexts. (Such a conception signals our deliberate commitment to a humanistic, normative -- and, ultimately, a critical -- perspective on social life.) While we claim that even habitual action is agentic, since it involves attention and "effort," such activity is largely unreflective and taken-for-granted; as actors encounter problematic situations requiring the exercise of imagination and judgment, they gain a reflective distance from received patterns that allows for greater inventiveness and choice. (On the other hand, we also note later that certain instances of imagination and judgment do entail elements of tacit and unreflective activity; such distinctions are hardly clear-cut.) A disaggregated conception of agency allows us to account for action that is "more" or "less" reflective, and to explain how reflectivity can change in either direction, through the increasing routinization or problematization of experience.

Third, we want to stress that this is not an individualistic conception of social action and human agency, and that it hardly represents a return to the metaphysical notion that "souls" or "wills" are the starting-point of "effort" (although we do rely heavily upon certain writings by metaphysical thinkers -- unavoidably so, given the pervasiveness of such ideas in the history of Western thought; on this, see White 1994). Agency is intrinsically social and relational, since it consists of the engagement (and disengagement) by actors of the different "contextual environments" of a structured (yet flexible) social universe. Just as consciousness is always consciousness of something (Husserl 1960), 50 too is agency always "agency toward something," by which actors can enter into relationship with surrounding persons, places, meanings, and events. Indeed, we highlight the importance of intersubjectivity, social interaction, and communication as critical components of agentic processes (Mead 1934): agency is always a communicative process by which actors immersed in the duree of lived experience engage with others within collectively organized contexts of action.

Finally, our threefold distinction among the dimensions of human agency does not imply any sort of differentiation among the components of the human mind or structures of the personality. We are not elaborating here a new philosophical psychology, or speaking of "personalities" or "psychological structures." To those who would inquire where the "personality" is to be found in our discussion of human agency, we respond that our aim, rather, is to show how "psychological structures," as patterned elements of the temporal-relational contexts of action, are themselves engaged," reproduced, and (sometimes) transformed through agentic processes. Human agency, as oriented by different temporal constructions, is precisely that analytical element that "breathes life" into, modifies, and sometimes challenges these structures in the course of social action. Through reflective activity, for example, it may redirect or alter the "channelling" influences of previously established patterns of object relations -- at both the intrapsychic and interpersonal levels (Slater 1963; Chodorow 1978). The study of individual and collective psychology belongs to the psychological context of action -- and not to the analysis of agentic processes themselves.

In the following discussion, then, we take up in turn three constituent elements of human agency -- the iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative tones of the "chordal triad." Within each of the sections to come, we review first the relevant history of concepts, then analyze "from within" the moment of agency at hand, then finally explore the implications of each aspect for concrete empirical research. In the concluding major section of this paper, we step back to discuss the different ways in which these three dimensions of human agency interpenetrate with the cultural, societal, and psychological contexts of action.

 

The Iterational Dimension of Agency

If we think of agency as a chordal triad composed of three analytically distinct elements (oriented variously toward the past, future, and present), then iterational dimension of agency appears as that chordal variation in which the past is the most resonant tone. Through habit and repetition, the past becomes a stabilizing influence that shapes the flow of effort and allows us to sustain identities, meanings, and interactions over time. The concept of iteration is crucial for our conception of agency, since we maintain that both the projective and practical-evaluative dimensions of agency are deeply grounded in habitual, unreflected, and mostly unproblematic patterns of action by means of which we orient our "efforts" in the greater part of our daily lives. We have settled upon the unfamijiar term of "iteration" precisely because the dimension of agency to which it refers is the most difficult to conceive in properly "agentic" terms. The subset of words with which it is colloquially associated -- routines, dispositions, preconceptions, competences, schemas, patterns, typifications, and traditions -- seem more to imply structure than what we commonly think of as agency. This problem is also reflected in most attempts to theorize the habitual dimension of action, since they focus upon recurring patterns of action themselves, and thus upon "structures," rather than the precise ways in which social actors engage with those preexisting patterns or structures.

Iteration: the history of a concept

In much of social and psychological theory, habit has unfortunately been seen as little more than a matter of stimulus-and-response, an orientation that shifts attention away from human agency and toward the structural contexts that shape action. Indeed, as Charles Camic points out, a prevailing tendency in much of social science since the early twentieth century has been to regard habit as "behavior that consists in a fixed, mechanical reaction to particular stimuli and [that] is, as such, devoid of meaning from the actor's point of view" (Camic 1986, p.1046). The historical reasons for this tendency are twofold: on the one hand, the emergence during the late nineteenth century of Darwinian evolutionary theory and of experimental physiology, and, on the other hand, the rise during that same period of a "militantly scientistic" new field of psychology. Between them, these two developments led to an identification of habitual action with the most elementary behavioral processes of the human organism, akin to those of the lower species (Camic 1986, pp.1048A9). The outcome was effectively to remove habit from the domain of social action. (See, e.g., Camic's illustrative discussions of W.I. Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, Robert Park, and Talcott Parsons, among others, in Camic [1986], pp.1072-75).

Our main concern in the discussion that follows is precisely to locate the agentic dimension in even the most routinized and prestructured forms of social action. Even relatively unreflective action, as we shall argue below, has its own moment of "effort." In distinguishing the iterational moment we highlight the need and capacity of individuals to give order to their social universes through typification and the routinization of their experience. But we also suggest that this is an active process, taking place through the selective reactivation of received structures within expected situations. We accordingly fall within a tradition of thought (also documented by Camic) that never did succumb to the aforementioned tendency to conceive of habit as a "fixed, mechanical reaction to stimuli." In this other tradition, it has always "been held that habit creates a stable inner core that affords immunity from external sensations and impetuous appetities...; that it is not by such stimuli as these, but by the ego itself, that habit is called into play and allowed to proceed...; and that, however much habitual action may be removed from 'hesitation and reflection,' such action is still no more 'mechanical' than action of the same type that emerges from wholly reflective processes" (Camic 1986, pp.104647; references omitted). These various tendencies all serve to emphasize that habit entails mote than mere biophysiological (or institutional) processes, that it includes the moment of agency as well -- no less than do the more reflective and deliberative modes of action.

Classical and medieval philosophy: Some of the earliest systematic thinking on the iterational aspect of human agency can be found in Aristotle, who uses the term hexis to refer to any settled disposition or "state" leading to action (Aristotle 1985, p.44). Aristotle distinguishes the hexis --sometimes also translated as "habit" -- from mechanical behavior as such: "If it were only (the latter], two people who displayed the same behavior on the same occasions would have the same state.... [But] someone's state also includes his desires, feelings, and decision" (Irwin 1985, pp.426-27). In the Nicomachean Ethics (1985), Aristotle further depicts habits as the basis for "virtues" or "excellences" of character," which unlike other states or habits entail a settled disposition toward appropriate action in accordance with wisdom. Habits could not form the basis for virtue if they were merely automatic activity. St. Thomas Aquinas, too, defines iterational activity (in his terminology, the habitus) as a manifestation of human agency. ("For Aquinas,.. .a habitus puts one's activity more under one's control than it might otherwise be. In this sense, to have a habitus is to be disposed to some activity or other -- not because one tends to that activity on every possible occasion, but because one finds it natural, readily coped with, an obvious activity to engage in, and so on [Davies 1992, pp.225-26].) In "The Treatise on Habits," moreover -- a major section of the Summa Theologica (1948) -- Aquinas also follows Aristotle in associating the habitus with moral virtue: "Virtue is a habitus which is always for good.... [It] is a habitus by which a person acts well" (Aquinas 1948, pp.822; 824).

Nineteenth and twentieth century social thought: More recently, both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber have offered additional (albeit ambivalent: see Camic 1986, pp.1055-57; 1064-66) contributions to our alternative tradition of thought on habit. Durkheim's educational sociology centers around the idea, in fact, that morally good habits must be carefully cultivated in children during their years of primary schooling, while "modern secondary schools, [for their own part, must] work to create a dutiful and reflective secular habitus to replace the religious habitus of the past" (Camic 1986, p.1055; see also Durltheim 1961; Durkheim 1983; Emirbayer 1994). Weber, too (despite his well-known emphasis upon rational action), deliberately reserves a place for "traditional action" in his scheme -- for that "unreflective, set disposition to engage in actions... long practiced" (Camic 1986, p.1057) which constitute, in his view, "the great bulk of all everyday action" (Weber 1978, p.25). Like Durkheim, he also investigates the historical conditions under which different forms of (traditional as well as modern) habitus could became dominant. Finally, Dewey contributes also to this same perspective on habit in Human Nature and Conduct (1922). Habits, he maintains there, "are active means, means that project themselves, energetic and dominating ways of acting.... Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will" (Dewey 1922, pp.26; 40-41). Significantly for our purposes, this critique of behavioral reductionism allows Dewey to elaborate the social and psychological foundations for a democratic politics (Westbrook 1991). Habit now emerges as something inherently plastic and educable, rather than a matter of mere stimulus-and-response. Indeed, Dewey argues that the goal of a democratic politics should be to replace the unreflective habits with "intelligent" ones "which experience has shown to make us sensitive, generous, imaginative, [and] impartial" (Dewey 1922, p.194; quoted in Westbrook 1991, p.293).

During the mid-twentieth century, phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz further developed similar views, reconceptualizing habit as a form of "pre-reflective intentionality" (Kestenbaum 1977). For Merleau-Ponty, intentionality is located prior to language in the sedimentation of meaning of the body; the body is conceived as an "intentional arc" directed toward the world, the vehicle by means of which communication with the world is carried out (Merleau-Ponty 1964, pp.67; Schmidt 1985). ₁₀ Schutz, on the other hand, emphasizes the social (rather than the embodied) dimension of the pre-reflexive lifeworid, finding in Weberian "ideal types" a model for the schemas and typifications that guide social actors during their routinized daily lives. These typifications (described in more detail below) provide for the continuity of social knowledge over time; while such knowledge is taken-for-granted, it nevertheless has a "highly socialized structure, that is, it is assumed to be taken for granted not only by me, but by us, by 'everyone'" (Schutz 1962, p.75). This focus upon the routinized, pre-reflective character of the social world also provides the basis for Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (1984) as well as for the social constructivism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), who echo Dewey in seeing habitual action as essentially meaningful; in fact, habit provides the basis, through a narrowing of choices, for more reflective forms of action: "Habitualization carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed... .by providing a stable background in which human action may proceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time[;] it frees energy for such decisions as may be necessary.. In other words, the background of habitual activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation" (Berger and Luckinan 1966, p.53).

Theories of practice: Finally, in recent decades, so-called theorists of "practice" (Ortner 1984) such as Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and Giddens (1979, 1984) build upon the insights of both pragmatism and phenomenology, as well as upon earlier traditions of thought. They seek to explain social reproduction by recovering the key role of routinized practical activity, while simultaneously preserving the role of agency in the implementation of habits and dispositions. Bourdieu, for one, uses the Aristotelian/Thomistic idea of habitus to illuminate the formative influences of the past upon the cognitive, corporeal, and intentional structures of empirical action. He characterizes the habitus as a "durably inculcated" set of transposable classificatory schemas that are internalized over the course of lived experience within a regularly organized social universe, particularly within the family and the educational system. Through "sedimentation" (to borrow a term from Merleau-Ponty) of past experiences in the body, he maintains that social actors develop a set of pre-conscious expectations about the future ("intentionless intentions") that lead them to act in accordance with those expectations. Such expectations are typically inarticulate, naturalized, and taken-for-granted, even though they may also be strategically mobilized in accordance with the contingencies of particular empirical situations. Bourdieu recognizes the compatibility of such notions with the insights of both Dewey and the phenomenologists: "The theory of practical sense," he affirms, "presents many similarities with theories, such as Dewey's, that grant a central role to the notion of habit, understood as an active and creative relation to the world" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p.122).

In similar fashion, Giddens conceptualizes the agentic dimension of routine behavior in terms of what he calls the "stratification model of action" (Giddens 1979, p.56). By distinguishing between three levels of consciousness -- discursive consciousness, practical consciousness, and the unconscious -- he in effect constructs a continuum between the reflective and the unreflective dimensions of action. While he insists (against behaviorist models) that actors "know a great deal" about their own motivations and conditions of actions, he carefully distinguishes between "intentionality as process," which informs all actions (including routine ones), and conscious purposes or reasons, which "only form discrete accounts in the context of queries, whether initiated by others, or in a process of self-examination by the actor" (Giddens 1979, p.57). Yet even these more conscious queries emerge out of a background of "tacitly employed mutual knowledge" (Giddens 1979, p.58) by which social interactions are reflexively monitored. Giddens is particularly interested in the concept of routinization because of his ontological presuppositions: in his view, humans are always confronted by a multiplicity of possible interpretations and choices that require them to engage in active processes of "reducing complexity" (Luhmann 1990; Giddens 1991) in order to give meaning and direction to their actions. Building upon Garfinkel's (1984) work on the interactive monitoring of conduct and Erikson's (1963, 1968) theory of childhood development, Giddens emphasizes the need for "basic trust" and "ontological security" that drives humans to routinize their practices and to give order and stability to their relationships, especially in face of the growing complexity and diversity of modern society (Giddens 1991; see also White 1992).

Giddens's theory has the advantage of accounting for how the less reflective and routine regulation of conduct underlies more conscious articulations of purposive action. Indeed, he terms routinization the "master key" of his theory of structuration, in effect giving "practical consciousness" a privileged place in the explanation of social reproduction. Moreover, in underscoring the agentic moment in the reproduction of structures, he develops the important idea of recursivity: structures (which Giddens defines as "rules and resources") are really only "virtual" structures (pradigmatic patterns) that must be recursively activated within social practices. The agentic dimension of routinized action lies precisely in the recursive implementation of structures by human actors. In this process, "structure forms society and personality simultaneously, but in neither case exhaustively," on account of the mediating influence of the unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences of action. ₁₁ On the other hand, as we shall argue below, Giddens's perspective -- like that of Bourdieu -- stresses too one-s idedly the iterational and unreflective moment of agency, failing to theorize the ways in which social actors imaginatively and evaluatively reconfigure past influences in response to emerging situations (We also disagree with Giddens that the drive for ontological security is the sole, or even the primary, motivating force in social action, especially as it fails to show why it is that humans sometimes even risk and pursue change.) These latter considerations are better dealt with, we argue, through careful investigation of the projective and practical-evaluative moments of human agency.

The internal strncture of iteration

From the foregoing discussion we can see that according to many major theorists, habitual and routinized activities are not devoid of agency. Here we would like to elaborate upon the insights of these authors by examining in more detail how agency works to reproduce past patterns of action. The primary locus of agency for the iterational dimension, we argue, lies in actors' ability to recall, to appropriately app ly, and to maneuver around the schematization of social experience (recall Figure 2). It is manifested in the more or less tacit and taken-for-granted selection from among previously developed schemas of action. (Schemas are corporeal, affective, and relational as well as cognitive patterns; they consist in the interpenetration of mental categories, social organization, and embodied practices.) The agentic dimension lies in how actors selectively recognize, locate, and implement such schemas, and in this way sustain and reproduce identities and institutions over time. While what we refer to here as "selection" may take place at a low level of conscious reflection, the term helps to indicate the narrowing of possibilities that the iterational aspect of agency makes possible. Some contexts are more stable than others, and thereby allow for a greater depth of taken-for-granted activity in which previously formulated schemas of thought and action may be recursively applied in a reasonably satisfactory and self-sustaining manner. For the sake of greater specificity, let us now now subdivide the iterational moment into a number of interrelated components (keeping in mind that thes& feed into one another in practice), each of which involves the engagement of a particular kind of schematizing process.

Directing attention: At any given moment actors are able to focus attention on only a small area of social reality. As Schutz tells us, "there is a small kernel of knowledge that is clear, distinct, and consistent in itself. This kernel is surrounded by zones of various gradations of vagueness, obscurity, and ambiguity" (Schutz 1964, p.283). The quality of attention directed at any element or "zone" of knowledge is conditioned by what Schutz calls "systems of relevances," developed over the course of biographical histories and social experience, which alert actors as to what elements of emerging situations require attention and response. The same idea is expressed in the psychological notion of "gestalt," which shows how the activity of directing attention is also linked to unconscious or psychodynamic processes. Many elements of practical, day-to-day activity may require only marginal clarity of consciousness; yet even the semi-obscure zone of habitual, taken-for-granted activity requires a selective focusing of attention in order to single out the elements of response required to sustain a particular form of interaction.

Recognizing types: In order to identify patterns of experience and to predict their recurrence in the future, actors routinely construct simplifying models, or what Weber calls "ideal types," by which they characterize certain recurrent aspects of persons, relationships, contexts, or events. As Schutz puts it, this process of typification takes place through a "synthesis of recognition" by which actors recognize the "sameness," "likeness," "similarity," or "analogy," of an emerging experience with those of the past, either within the actor's direct memory or within a social memory as objectified and transmitted in the various media of communication. While emergent situations never completely match these simplifying idealizations, actors tend to retrospectively assimilate new experiences to the old by means of an "enveloping" procedure in which differences or faulty "fits" are smoothed over through use of what Garfinkel (1984) calls the "et cetera clause." Through this active process of recognition and assimilation, actors contribute to a sense of continuity and order within temporally evolving experiences.

Locating relationships: Social actors not only identify similarities between past and present "types" of experiences; they also locate these typifications in relation to other persons, contexts and events within

temporal-relational matrices composed of socially recognized categories of identity and value. These matrices may be built upon sets of binary oppositions (according to Levi-Strauss 1966, and more recently, Bourdieu 1977), which delineate such physical, social, and normative boundaries as hot and cold, front and back, male and female, strong and weak. As Bourdieu argues, such homologous systems of oppositions constitute transposable schemas by means of which fields of social relationships -- and corresponding values of "social capital" -- can be objectively "mapped." On the other hand, these classificatory schemas may also be non-binary and composed of more complex sets of multivalent relationships, containing nuanced lines of inclusion and exclusion, acceptability and non-acceptability, within cross-cutting contexts of action (Douglas 1985, Alexander 1988c). Although for the most part these matrices are unreflective and taken-for-granted, actors must still exercise attention and effort in order to locate correctly where given experiences fit within them. This localizing activity in turn allows actors to competently apply the relational and normative categories that keep social relationships "working" along established lines.

Maneuvering among repertoires: As we have seen, the employment of routines is not mechanically or situationally "determined"; rather, it requires a process of selection from practical repertoires of habitual activity that always transcend the boundaries of the situation at hand. While repertoires are limited by cultural and biographical histories, and may be more or less extensive and flexible, they do require a certain degree of maneuverability in order to assure the appropriateness of the response to the situation at hand. (It is in this respect that the iterational moment most closely resembles what we shall later describe as practical evaluation.) In unproblematic situations, this maneuvering process is semi-conscious or taken-for-granted, the result of the "incorporation" of schemas of action into one's embodied practical activity. On the other hand, the application of such repertoires remains "intentional" in that it allows one to get things done through habitual interactions (allowing Bourdieu to speak of the apparent paradox of "intentionless intentions"). As Bourdieu stresses, there may be much resourcefulness and ingenuity to the selection of responses from practical repertoires, even when this contributes to the reproduction of a given structure of social relationships.

Maintaining expectations: One of the essential results of the various forms of schematization described above (systems of relevances, typifications, temporal-relational matrices, and practical repertoires) is that they provide actors with more or less reliable knowledge of social relationships that allows them to predict what will happen in the future. These patterns of expectations give stability and continuity to action, by allowing actors the sense of what Schutz (following Husserl) calls "I can do it again" -- and "trust" (Garfinkel 1963, 1984) that others will act in predictable ways. The maintenence of expectations about how oneself and others will act in the future is not an automatic process (one's expectations about the future can "break down"). Rather, it involves effort, attention, selectivity, and (as Garfinkel tells us) "repair," since one's knowledge of social relationships and sense of their relevance changes over time. The "maintenance work" that goes into sustaining expectations has practical as well as ontological importance, allowing not only for a sense of consistent identity amidst change (Pizzorno 1986; Melucci 1994), but also for social coordination within contingent and interdependent social environments.

These briefly sketched elements of'the iterational aspect of agency share a common orientation toward past experiences as the dominant tone of the actor's engagement of the world. In each case, the effort of the actor is directed toward the recursive mobilization of the various cognitive, practical, and affective schemas by which personal and collective memories are meaningfully organized. However, as these examples show, this primary orientation toward the past also shades over into the present and the future, approaching in the process the projective and practical-evaluative dimensions of agency. It will be helpful here to recall the imagery of the "internal chordal triad," which we presented earlier (see Figure 2). In this case, the present and the future emerge as minor tones; within the interational dimension of agency, the present is characterized by maneuver, as the improvised (although generally unreflective, or tacit) manipulation of the processes of selection described above, in order to gain advantage by mobilizing the schemas of thought and action according to the relational contingencies of a given situation. The future, on the other hand, is characterized by expectation, as the memory-sustained certainty that past patterns of experiences will repeat themselves in successive interactions, which thereby allow one to sustain and reproduce relationships over time.

Iteration m empirical research

The central limitation of many of the theories of agency cited above -- in particular, those of Bourdieu, Giddens, and Garfinkel -- is that they tend to restrict the discussion of human agency to its iterational dimension. While they do in fact recuperate the creative, improvisational, and foresightful dimensions of the implementation of schemas of action -- what we call here manuever and expectation -- they do not show us how established schemas can be challenged, reconsidered, and reformulated. Their insights focus upon a very low level of reflectivity, concentrating on the "taken-for-granted" nature of routinized practical consciousness as the key to the stability and reproduction of the cultural and institutional order. This is not to say, on the other hand, that these authors believe that change is impossible; Giddens's notion of "discursive consciousness" and Bourdieu's calls for a "reflexive sociology" suggest that each believes that a certain increase in human freedom and flexibility of action is possible the more "conscious" one becomes of one's situation. However, their theoretical frameworks do not help us to analyze this possibility, nor do they give us the tools to recognize it in the course of empirical research. With these limitations in mind, we should still acknowledge that the iterational dimension of agency provides us with a rich source of research questions, as recent work in the tradition of the aforementioned theorists indicates.

Cultural competences: Bourdieu's notion of habitus proves highly useful in showing how different formative experiences -- such as those influenced by gender, race, ethnicity, or class backgrounds -- deeply shape the web of cognitive, affective, and bodily schemas (or "cultural competences") through which actors come to know how to act in particular social worlds. Ann Swidler (1986) evokes Bourdieu in speaking of the "cultural toolbox" of practical competences that predispose actors to feel a "fit" within some actions and not others; thus, underprivileged youth may desire the same ends as middle class youth, but feel themselves to be socially and culturally ill-equipped to pursue these ends. Swidler's account of the genesis of values as succeeding rather than preceeding actions echoes Garfinkel's (1984) description of retrospective accounting practices: "Action is not determined by one's values. Rather, action and values are organized to take advantage of cultural competences" (Swidler 1986, p.275). Although Loic Wacquant (1992b) criticizes the implicit instrumentalism of Swidler's account, his work on boxing in Chicago ghetto neighborhoods sounds very similar themes by exploring how embodied competences and classificatory schemas first learned within the street environment underlie boxers' subsequent engagement of the "pugilistic field" (Wacquant 1992b). Likewise, Michele Lamont's (1992) research into morals and manners among upper and working class men in France and the United States examines how the classificatory schemas developed within different class, race, and national settings influence the "boundary work" of social actors in articulating tastes and aspirations, as well as in distinguishing them from other social groups. (In the conclusion to this work, however, Linont directs some effective criticisms at Bourdieu's social theory.) In such ways, all these writers claim, the mental schemas "inculcated" through lived, bodily experience tend to "correspond" to (and thus to reproduce) social relations: "social structures and cognitive structures are recursively and structurally linked, and the correspondence that obtains between them provides one of the most solid props of social domination" (Wacquant 1992a, p.14).

Reproduction through creativity: While Wacquant and Lamont tend to focus upon the "closeness of fit" between the habitus and subsequent (agentic) activity, others operating in a similar theoretical tradition emphasize the conflictual and contradictory relationships between agentic activity and social reproduction. For example, Paul Willis (1977), in his celebrated study of the cultural creativity of rebellious working class lads, argues that their interactively generated criticism and rejection of middle class trajectories was shaped by their working-class experience and leads, ironically, to the reproduction of their subordinate class position. In a different demonstration of reproduction through creativity (in which the actor's intention is to "fit in" rather than to "drop out"), Garfinkel (1984, ch.5) also shows how "Agnes" deploys tremendous effort and ingenuity in order to successfully negotiate the taken-for-granted dimension of social interactions and thereby to "pass" 1986); and early success may reduce experimentation and lead to "competency traps" that prevent responsiveness to possible improvements (Levitt and March 1988).

 

The Projective Dimension of Agency

Human actors do not merely repeat the past; they are also shapers and inventors of new possibilities for thought and action. In addressing this second dimension of agency, we need to shift our analytic attention away from the orientation of agency toward the past and focus instead on how agentic processes give shape and direction to future possibilities. We argue here that an imaginative engagement of the future is also a crucial component of the "effort" of human actors. As they respond to the challenges and uncertainties of social life, actors are capable of distancing themselves (at least in partial and exploratory ways) from the schemas, habits, and traditions that constrain social identities and institutions. This in turn enables them to recompose and innovate upon those traditions in accordance with their evolving desires and purposes. The subset of words used to describe this aspect of agency has ranged from the strongly purposive terminology of goals, plans, and objectives to the more ephemeral language of dreams, wishes, desires, anxieties, hopes, fears, and aspirations. In this essay, we term it the projective dimension of human agency.

We want to stress from the outset that the proj ective aspect of agency is not necessarily "better" than (or morally superior to) the iterational dimension. Just as received traditions, routines, and classificatory schemas can serve as the basis for admirable forms of human relationships, so too can the potential inventiveness of projectivity be applied in "anti-social," destructive, or discriminatory ways. Our point is a more basic one: as actors immersed in the temporal duree move "beyond themselves" into the future, they construct changing images of where they think they are going, where they want to go, and how they can get there from where they are at present. These images form the bases for "projects," conceived with varying degrees of clarity and detail, and extending with greater or lesser "reach" into the future. Such projects entail proposed interventions on many intersecting levels of social life. They can can be as benign and mundane as the projects to grow a garden, to start a business, or to patch up a family relationship, or as sweeping and transformative as the projects to eliminate racial discrimination, to overthrow a government, or to establish a 1000-year Reich (see footnote 1).

Projectivity: the history of a concept

Before we get caught up in universalist presuppositions, we should acknowledge again that not all time periods, cultures, theoretical traditions, or even individuals are equally "projective." Anthropologists have shown, for example, that some cultures have temporal constructions in which the future plays a restricted role. Luhmann [1990] distinguishes between "ancient" conceptions of time -- according to which an "enduring present" confronts a moving temporal flow where the future is largely predetermined by the past -- and "modern" conceptions, in which lived experience is conceived as moving toward an indeterminate future, which is purposefully constructed through means-ends rationality. In examining changing historical conceptions of projectivity, we recognize that the future-oriented inventiveness of projectivity, as we sketched it above, is itself a recent, culture-bound construction, embedded in a particular narrative-based structuring of time and Western ontological conceptions of human freedom. Yet this reaffirms our basic premise: that the specific, culturally-embedded ways in which people imagine, talk about, negotiate over, and make commitments to their futures influences their degree of freedom and maneuverability in relation to existing structures. It matters to what degree they understand time as something fixed and determinate, or conversely, as something open and negotiable. The relationship between different historical constructions of time and changing orientations toward action becomes clear when we examine the development of the concept of proj ectivity in Western thought.

Biblical and Hellenic conceptions: From the Hebraic and Greek traditions, we gain some of the most important early conceptions of the projective capacity of human beings. In Exodus and Revolution (1985), Michael Waizer, for example, offers a compelling interpretation of early biblical narratives, showing how conceptions of the Jewish people about the future and their own relationship to it -- ideas of the "covenant," "redemption," and the "promised land" --. came later to influence Christian narratives of redemption, as well as the discourse of revolutionary politics in the modern world. Within the static and destiny-bound framework of the ancient Greeks, however, the future did not have the centrality it has today as an object of human imagination and action; in Luhmann's (1982) terms, the future moved toward actors rather than actors moving toward the future. Plato was deeply suspicious of the imagination as a source of illusion, irrationality, and immorality, in opposition to the pure, ideal, and eternal world of rational form (Kearney 1988, p.108). From Aristotle's realist epistemology, on the other hand, came the beginnings of a more benign view of the imagination as a psychological link between sensation and reason, which, while not exactly "productive" in the way Kant and later romantics would see it, provided the basis for rational deliberation about the future by allowing social actors to transcend the bounds of sensible experience. Aristotle also gives us the key conception of the telos of action as a basis for means-ends rationality, a view that provides philosophic grounding for prevailing Western instrumentalist narratives about the future. Tensions between these two contributions of the Aristotelian legacy can be seen in later divisions betweem idealist or romantic rejections of the practical value of the imagination (in which the transcendental imagination is idealized as the "privileged expression of human freedom" [Kearney 1988, p.175],) and the abstractly rational -- and imaginatively impoverished -- instrumentality of the utilitarian tradition.

The Enlightenment legacy: This Aristotelian tension reappears in various ways throughout modern social theory, as can be seen in the Enlightenment debate over whether instrumental rationality or transcendental values are the truest expression of human freedom and agency. Are actors rational calculators capable of surveying all possible options and choosing the one best able to advance their interests? Or, alternatively, as Kant maintains, are they autonomous wills underdetermined by any incentives or causes other than the moral law to which they have freely submitted? Although Kant's focus on norms is an important rejoinder to narrow utilitarianism, it serves to reify the distinction between interests and ideals; historically, this has made it difficult for social theorists (such as Durkheim and Parsons) to conceptualize the proj ective dimension of agency (which we argue is necessarily composed of both strategic and normative orientations). Although "middle-range" theorists such as Merton (1949) did pay attention to future-oriented phenomena such as social aspirations and "self-fulfilling prophecies," their tendency was to explain these in terms of normative structures rather than through what we are calling "projective" activity.

Recently, the utilitiarian conception of social action has vigorously reappeared in the guise of rational choice theory. Following Homans's (1964) call to "bring men back in," rational choice advocates have sought to return to an action theory firmly grounded in the purposive, instrumental, and calculating orientations of individuals. Some of the possibilities and problems of their approach can be seen in James Coleman's major synthetic work, Foundations of Social Theory (1990), in which he attempts to link purposive activity at the "micro" level to a conception of the constitution of social processes through systemic interdependencies and interactions at the "macro" level. Coleman tries (unsuccessfully, in our view) to overcome the Kantian division between norms and interests by arguing that rational choice assumptions can provide the underpinnings for a normative theory, through a transactional conception of social norm construction by means of power-weighted social influence. Coleman's important contribution lies in his demonstration that individual choices are always embedded within larger systems of interactions, and hence that the pursuit of individual purposes is always a complex social phenomenon. However, he fails to overcome the problem at the heart of rational choice explanations of agency, a problem stemming from the (clearly acknowledged) decision to bracket the question as to how actors actually reach decisions that can be retrospectively interpreted as rational. By attributing the impulse to action to an abstract rationality that may be a far cry from how real actors act, he assumes that "actions are 'caused' by their (anticipated) consequences" (Coleman 1986, p.1312). While this bracketing of subjective processes does in fact lead to the prediction of an impressive range of social phenomena resulting from individual choices, it does not allow us to understand the uncertain and shifting processes whereby choices are imaginatively constructed by forward-looking actors. It is this "backward" causal attribution implicit in utilitarian and rational-choice conceptions of agency that thinkers working in the phenomenological and existentialist traditions seek to redress.

Phenomenological and existentialist perspectives: The concept of social actors as fundamentally rational and calculating has been deeply challenged by phenomenological and existentialist thiukers, who ironically share with rational choice theory a focus upon the individual and a strong interest in questions of human freedom and self-fashioning. What they question is the optimistic assumption that abstract rationality can or does serve as a basis for developing projects of action. Prior to all rational understanding, actors are "thrown" into historically evolving situations; out of the anguish, uncertainty, and longing that arise from this condition of "becoming," they necessarily "project" themselves into their own possibilities of being. Hence reflection about the fliture is characterized by emotional engagement, "for when existence is interpenetrated with reflection it generates passion" (Kiekegaard 1944, p.313). Heidegger (1962) terms this dimension "care" (sorge), the preconscious, affective engagement of the world that constitutes the "forestructure" of action. In this way, he firmly links projectivity to the motivational structure of action; actors invest "effort" in the formulation of projects because in some way or another they care about (not just "have an interest in") what will happen to them in the future. ₁₂ As Sartre (1956) stresses, however, our emotional engagement of the future implies a dimension of incompleteness, a continual temporal thrust to surpass our situation of "lack." This leads to the ultimate impossibility of ever achieving a unity between what he terms "being-in-itself" and "being-for-itself," the self as identity and the self as project. "The fundamental project of the for-itself is to achieve a coincidence with what it lacks" (Bernstein 1971, p.139).

In their concern with the anxieties and dilemmas of the projecting self, existentialists in the Sartrian tradition can be accused of a kind of "ontological solipsism" (Bernstein 1971) that pays too little attention to the social meanings and purposes that are expressed by human projects. The bridge from the existential and phenomenological traditions to the sociological preoccupation with shared meaning is made instead by Alfred Schutz, who follows Husseri in focusing upon the project as the fundamental meaning of action. Schutz brings Husseri's basically epistemological observations into the realm of action theory, by saying that "the meaning of any action is its corresponding projected act." Projects represent the completed act4o-be as imagined in the future perfect tense; "the unity of the action is a junction of the span or breadth of the project" (Schutz 1967, pp.61; 62) By focusing on the meaning of action for the actor, Schutz takes up the question bracketed by rational choice theory; he is interested not in behavioral outcomes, but in how forward-looking (1)ut not always utility-maximizing) actors actually construct choices out of fluid and shifting fields of possibilities. For Schutz, purposeful action is rarely guided by the abstract, objective analysis of means and ends, or by the clear choice between alternatives, that rational choice theorists (ironically, in common with Parsons [Schutz 1978]) propose. Not only is action limited and shaped by "typifications" from past experiences, but, more to the point, both means and ends are always temporally evolying, multiply inflected, and subject to high degrees of indeterminacy. Plans and purposes undergo a continuing process of projective "phantisizing," in which "rays of attention" are focused upon a plurality of possible future states until choices detatch themselves, "like overripe fruit," from the subjective horizons of future actions. ₁₃

Pragmatist perspectives: While the concept of projects as presented by the existentialist and phenomenological traditions provides key insights into the temporal embeddedness of meaning and action, it is less helpful in showing what projects are good for -- that is, how our projective capacity is essential to problem-solving in daily life. Here we must take recourse to the pragmatists, who in addition to their concern with routine, are attuned to the imaginative flexibility that inheres in actors' deliberations about the future. Projects emerge, as they point out, when taken-for-granted and routinized forms of action are no longer adequate for resolving the emergent problems (or, to use existentialist terminology, the situations of "lack") that confront social actors in their lives. Despite John Dewey's preoccupation with habit (as discussed in the earlier section), he also believed that the experimental relationship with the future is an essential dimension of human action, and, in particular, of action directed toward problem-solving within a democratic community. "Experience in its vital form is experimental, an effort to change the given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching forward into the unknown; connection with the future is its salient trait." Human intelligence is based upon the capacity to "read future results in present on-goings" ([)ewey 1981, pp.61; 69); it is this projective capacity that permits the kind of "responsive choice" and inventive manipulation of the physical and social worlds that is so essential to democratic participation. Here we see clearly the social dimension of projectivity: projects are constituted not solely by one's "thrown-ness" into an uncertain world in which one is "condemned" to freedom, but also by the practical exercise of that freedom along with others in the pursuit of a common good.

Continuing in the pragmatist tradition, George Herbert Mead (1934) also stresses the essentially social and intersubjective dimension of projectivity. He argues that our basic self-concept is developed from the capacity to project ourselves into the experiences of others; in fact, it is the imaginative capacity of the "I" to move between multiple, situationally variable "me's" that constitutes the freedom and maneuverability of the individual in relation to pre-established roles, as well as making possible social coordination, joint problem-solving, and collective projects of resistance and reform: "in the same way that he takes the attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward one another, [the actor also takes] their attitudes toward the various phases or aspects of the common social activity...[or] social projects" (Mead 1934, p.153, emphasis added). Indeed, we see that it is precisely the proj ective work of the imagination that allows us to speak of such common sociological phenomena as identification, empathy, solidarity, and role-playing, as well as to account for "collective ideals," group and intergroup negotiation, and strategic interaction. Echoing Mead, Pizzorno (1986) shows how this projection is intertemporal as well as interpersonal: commitment to collective identities (and action) depends upon the actor's location within "circles of recognition" by which the continuity of the self is maintained. Within such circles, collective ideals, narratives, and ideologies work by connecting actors with what Schutz terms the worlds of "predecessors" and "successors"; they define "the optimal state for future selves, for the person and for the collectivity." By supporting collective identities, projections about the future organize both individual and joint action: "identity through time will be securely defined by the standards of recognition anticipated for.. .future selves" (Pizzorno 1986, p.371).

The internal structure of projectivity

As the foregoing discussion suggests, the concept of projectivity has a rich legacy in philosophy, psychology, and sociological theory. Our own conception builds critically upon the insights of the above-mentioned theorists, but seeks to give a more concrete elaboration of how projectivity actually works in social processes. Properly conceived, projectivity is neither radically voluntarist nor narrowly instrumentalist; the formation of projects is always an interactive, culturally embedded process by which social actors negotiate their paths toward the future, receiving their driving impetus from the conflicts and challenges of social life. ₁₄ Yet while clearly shaped and channelled by temporal-relational contexts of action, projects are not "predetermined" by institutionalized careers or positions in an objective social field (as Bourdieu for example, seems to suggest). The locus of agency, rather, lies in the hypothesization of experience, as actors attempt to reconfigure past patterns by generating possible future responses to the problematic situations they confront in their lives (see Figure 2). This locates projects in a critical mediating relationship between the iterational and practical-evaluative dimensions of agency. Projects represent the first step toward reflectivity, as the response of a desirous imagination to problems that cannot satisfactorily be resolved by the taken-for-granted habits of thought and action that characterize the background structure of the social world. In this sense, it entails a crucial prelude to deliberation and decision-making, as we will show in the section on practical-evaluation. As in the previous section, we now tentatively outline several important processes involved in the projection of future action, keeping in mind again that these overlap with and feed into one another, interacting in a recursive, open-ended, and synergistic fashion.

Anticipatory identification: Alternatives are never clearly and neatly presented; but neither is the future an "open book." Understanding the limited and yet flexible structure of future possibilities involves the work of identifying patterns of possible developments in an often vague and indeterminate future horizon. As Schutz tells us, this anticipatory work is done by means of a retrospective engagement with one's prior "stock of knowledge" as stored in typifications, repertoires, and social narratives. This retrospective-prospective process shows the essential role of memory in the mapping of future actions. We draw upon past experiences in order to clarify motives, goals and intentions; to locate possible future constraints; and to identify practically and morally appropriate courses of action. These anticipatory identifications are never accomplished "once and for all," but rather are subject to continual reevaluation in light of the shifting and multidimensional character of motivations, social conditions, and human relationships.

Narrative construction: An essential element of projectivity consists in the construction of narratives that locate social possibilities in relation to more or less coherent causal and temporal sequences. While narratives are not identical with projects (since narratives represent one particular form of "cultural structure" that may exist independently from intentionality), they do provide cultural resources by which actors develop a sense of movement forward in time (i.e., the proverbial beginning, middle, and end). Bruner (1986) notes that such "stories" consist of at least three basic elements: plight, character, and consciousness; in our terms, these elements of plot construction help actors to visualize proposed resolutions to lived conflicts (see also Taylor 1989). All societies contain repertoires of stories that serve as temporal framing resources and that help define membership in a community (Carr 1986; Somers 1992); the degree of specificity and complexity with which futures are imagined is closely related to the salience of existing social narratives and the careers" (White 1992) that they present as both practically and morally acceptable. While narratives provide "maps of action" (Ricoeur 1991), and thus help to institutionalize stages in the life course (Cohler 1982; Meyer 1986), they also, because of their flexible and metaphoric structure, can be used to experimentally posit new resolutions to emerging problems.

Symbolic recomposition: The projective imagination works in a way analogous to the capacity of metaphor to create semantic innovation; it takes elements of meaning apart in order to bring them together again in new, unexpected combinations, with the effect of abolishing "the logical distance between heretofore distinct semantic fields." Ricoeur describes imagination as the "free play of possibilities in a state of non-involvement with respect to the world of perception or of action" (Ricoeur 1991, pp.173; 174). Due to their multivocal, homologous, and transposable character, symbolic codes and schemas of action can be creatively reconfigured in the play of metaphor loosened from practical constraints. Likewise, social narratives can be recomposed as new endings are imagined for old stories, in response to emergent dilemmas, hopes, and desires. Such imaginative reconfigurations can, in moments of historical upheaval, have far-reaching political and social repercussions when they result in the reformulation of cultural narratives, the emergence of new normative ideals, and the proposal of alternative ways of organizing social relations and institutions (McLaughlin 1978; Castoriadis 1987).

Play of scenarios: Since imagination frees action from immediate spatio4emporal constraints, it allows actors to playfully insert themselves into a variety of alternative trajectories and thereby to spin out the possible consequences resulting from alternative means-ends sequences. It allows them, in other words, to ask the counter-factual question, "what would happen if...?" and thereby expand their flexible response to a given field of action. This capacity to imaginatively place oneself within possible future scenarios has an intersubjective dimension, which receives especially interesting attention within game theory. Actors in intersubjective games make decisions on the basis of imaginative scenarios in respect to the simultaneous imaginative projections of other actors (Axelrod 1984). In a potentially less agonistic fashion, such joint projections of and deliberations over possible scenarios of action also provide the communicative basis for the formulation of strategies of collective action, social movements, and institution-building (Melucci 1989), as well as for the development of social policies by state and societal actors.

Hypothetical resolution: After surveying possible scenarios of action, actors face the task of proposing hypothetical resolutions that will adequately respond to the practical and normative concerns arising from their lived conflicts. The fact that all of our conflicts are overdetermined in nature, as well as the fact that our sense of relevance changes over the course of a lifetime, requires that such resolutions be synthetic in nature; the latter often address several conflicts simultaneously and incorporate different fields of intended action. A career project, for example, may jointly address a person's desire for money, status, accomplishment, and creative expression, as well as the hope to "make a difference" in the wider world. Likewise, by participating in social movements, people can attempt to resolve societal problems while simultaneously gaining the opportunity for social recognition, solidarity, rebelliousness, and organizational achievement. While all of these "resolutions" are not necessarily present at the outset as clearly articulated "goals" of action (and may be understood, if at all, only through post facto reflection), most actors, when pressed, can give more or less differentiated and multivalent descriptions of what they "want" or "intend" in their plans to pursue a particular course of action.

Experimental enactment: This final dimension of projectivity rests on the borderline between imagination and action; once scenarios have been examined and solutions proposed, these "hypothetical" resolutions may be put to the test in tentative or exploratory social interactions. Psychologists such as Erikson (1968) describe the process of "role experimentation," by means of which people "try out" possible identities without committing themselves to the full responsibilities involved. Erikson argues that such experimental processes are particularly salient during periods of life transition such as adolescence, when people struggle to discover and to decide upon possible life directions. Experimental enactments often have ritual overtones, which have been studied in versions of symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1959) as well as dramaturgic anthropology. Victor Turner (1974), for example, describes the "social dramas" that are enacted during "liminal periods" in which societies ritualistically reverse social roles. Although Turner stresses how such dramas reinforce the social order, we would argue that such "experimental" and "liminal" periods may have a transformative and renovational effect upon the larger culture, as new possibilities of human interactions are imagined, tested, and eventually defined on a collective scale.

If we turn again to the chordal triads in Figure 2, we see that while the "dominant tone" in projectivity is the hypothetical generation of future possibilities, this triad also contains within itself "minor" tones that orient actors toward the other dimensions of time. We can summarize the foregoing discussion by saying that the relationship toward the past consists of the retrospective-prospective process of recomposition, in which elements drawn from received patterns are put together in possibly innovative ways in order to generate new trajectories of action. Projections, as we have seen, always draw upon previously constituted schemas and stocks of knowledge that come from prior experiences in social life. On the other hand, the orientation toward the present consists of the situated process of experimentation. As actors respond to emergent conflicts, hypothetical scenario-building and narrative reconstruction can help to shape new courses of action, which are developed through a process of imaginative play and experimental enactment of possible alternative courses of action.

Projectivity in empideal research

In considering these three temporal dimensions of projectivity -- how past patterns are imaginatively recomposed to generate new possibilities -- we open up a richly suggestive field for social research. Yet despite its extensive philosophical legacy, the notion of "projects" has been largely ignored within the empirical tradition of American sociology, due in part to its perceived "subjective" nature and the apparent incompatibility of imaginative phenomena with behavioral observation, macro-structural analysis, and survey techniques. We argue that projectivity needs to be rescued from the subjectivist ghetto and put to use in sociological research as an essential element in understanding processes of social reproduction and change. Many of the elements of proj ectivity outlined above have, in fact, been addressed by a wide body of literature in various social science disciplines, albeit in an untheorized and residual way; here we discuss several of these approaches (and their limitations) in order to point the way for future research.

Time perspectives: While life course approaches in sociology, as we showed in the previous section, have tended to focus upon the influence of past experiences on subsequent life paths, a well-developed sub-field in psychology has explored questions more directly linked to projectivity. Since the 1940s, research has been carried out on "time perspective" and its influence on such matters as academic success and civilian morale (Lewin 1948); more recently, this focus has joined with life course research to investigate changes in time perspective during different developmental periods, such as childhood, adolescence, and middle age. Of particular relevance to projectivity are studies exploring the construction of future expectations, examining such factors as variability in the density and extension of imagined future events (linked either to cognitive development [Cottle and Klineberg 1974; Devolder and Lens, 1982; Wessman and Gorman 1977] or to particular social contexts [Greene 1986, 1990]). While most of these studies are limited by their overly behavioral and correlational assumptions, recent theorists of narrativity have added an interpretive dimension to life course studies (Brim and Kagan 1980; Cohler 1982; Bruner 1986; Sarbin 1986), in particular by exploring how personal narratives about past and future are transforrhed at key moments of transition in the life course (Gergen 1977; Riegel 1975). Each of these approaches shows that future-orientation is an essential dimension of human thought and action; the challenge for sociological research is to understand the social dynamics by which actors elaborate time perspectives and narratives about the future - particularly in periods of personaland social transition - and how this is in turn a constitutive factor in social action.

Prophetic movements: A second line of work with direct relevance for projectivity is the extensive literature on prophetic, utopian, and revolutionary movements. While such literature tends to give too causal a role to ideational factors (as opposed, for example, to political and economic relationships), still we argue with Desroche (1979) and Ricoeur (1991) that the projective imagination as expressed in collective ideals and aspirations has a constitutive, and not just an epiphenomenal, role in a wide variety of historical phenomena, ranging from millenarian movements, religious cults, alternative communities, and revolutionary organizations, to more generalized forms of cultural "revival." For example, in The Pursuit of the Millenium (1977), Norman Cohn argues that milleniarian projections made a difference in the kind of social unrest that appeared in Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries: "the usual desire of the poor to improve the material conditions of their lives became transfused with phantasies of a world reborn into innocence through a final, apocalyptic massacre... Inspired by such phantasies, numbers of poor folks embarked on enterprises which were quite different from the usual revolts of peasants or artisans with local, limited aims" (Cohn 1977, pp.16-17). Likewise, William McLoughlin (1978) claims that the major "great awakenings" in American history, which "begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state," lead to cathartic revivals that "eventuate in basic restructurings of our institutions and redefinitions of our social goals" (McLoughlin 1978, p.2). While McLaughlin has too functionalist a view of the "adaptive" role of such awakenings, both his work and that of Cohn highlight the role of projectivity in the (occasionally dramatic) reformulations of social possibilities that gain emotional resonance and mobilizing power during times of uncertainty and change.

Framing processes: The projective imagination is also a factor in less apocalyptic forms of social movements and efforts at institutional reform. Most work in this well-researched area fails to grasp (or at least, to theorize adequately) the projective dimension; this is due in part to the paradigmatic split during the 1970s and 80s between "strategy" and "identity" (Cohen 1985), or rather, between those focusing upon rational processes of resource mobilization and claim-making (e.g., McCarthy and Zald 1977; Tilly 1978), and those stressing the development of shared meanings, identities, and solidarities (e.g., Touraine 1981; Melucci 1989). This split, which goes back to the Kantian division between interests and ideals, has had the effect of severing two intrinsically linked dimensions of projectivity: strategies are stripped of meaning and reflexivity, while identities are temporally flattened out and shorn of their orienting power (Mische 1994). Recent attempts to bring the two paradigms together (see Morris and Mueller 1992) have resulted in concepts approximating projectivity, such as that of collective action "frames" (Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986; Snow and Benford 1988, Gamson 1992), defined as "emergent, action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate social movement activities and campaigns" (Snow and Benford 1992). Snow and Benford insist that framing is an active phenonomenon "that implies agency and contention at the level of reality construction." These frames are both diagnostic and (importantly for us) prognostic: they suggest "a general line of action for ameliorating the problem and the assignment of responsibility for carrying out that action" (Snow and Benford 1992, pp.136; 137). Clearly, projectivity is implied here; in proposing new social "ends" as well as different "means" for arriving at them, actors draw upon -- and sometimes extend, rearrange, and transform -- the "master-frames" extant in the broader political culture.

Institutional innovation: A fourth research area in which projectivity is important (but as yet underdeveloped) is that of institutional innovation and change. As we have seen, the "new institutionalists" reacted against the rational choice views of organizational decision-making by swinging in the other direction; in effect they eclipsed the projective dimension by arguing that institutional purposes are embedded in routines that come to light only in post hoc accounting practices. But recently, some organizational researchers (DiMaggio 1991; Galaskiewicz 1991; Fligstein 1991; Brint and Karabel 1991) have tried to recuperate the purposeful and conflict-driven aspect of organizations and to pay more attention to processes of institution-building and reform. Thus, Joseph Galaskiewicz (1991) presents a case study of Minneapolis-St. Paul CEOs that shows "how field leaders can act purposively (albeit under conditions of bounded rationality) to construct and create institutions which in turn control and govern organizations' actions" (Galaskiewicz 1991, p.293). In an even stronger example, Paul DiMaggio (1991) invokes the language of projectivity (albeit without theorizing it) in his study of the purposeful action of museum professionals engaged in inter-organizational struggles to impose a particular model of art museum upon a developing organizational field." DiMaggio shows how the opportunities for these "professional projects" "reinforced the awareness of museum professionals and trustees that they were part of a collective enterprise, and thus the likelihood that they would look to one another as models and as sources of innovation" (DiMaggio 1991, p.277). These projects were constructed by drawing contentiously upon the "Western cultural account" of justice and progress (Meyer, Boli, and Thomas 1987), showing the importance of cultural narratives as resources in the development of collective projects of action.

 

The Practical-Evaluative Dimension of Agency

The final variation we examine in the chordal triad of agency is that which responds to the demands and contingencies of the present. Even relatively unreflective, routine dispositions must be adjusted to the exigencies of changing situations; and newly imagined projects must be "brought down to earth" within real world circumstances. Moreover, judgments and choices must often be made in the face of considerable ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflict; means and ends sometimes contradict each other and unintended consequences require changes in strategy and direction. The problematization of experience in response to emergent situations thus calls for increasingly reflective and interpretive work on the part of social actors. This work is always (at least potentially) communicative in scope, occasioned by the learning processes that take place in social interactions. Others have variously termed this (communicative) exercise of situationally-based judgment practical wisdom, prudence, practical judgment, art, tact, discretion, invention, application, improvisation, and intelligence; we designate it as the practical-evaluative dimension of agency.

Practical evaluation: the histovy of a concept

Despite its long history, the concept of practical evaluation has received less sustained and systematic treatment during modern times than it did in the ancient or medieval periods. In contemporary action theory and moral philosophy, it has been overshadowed by an emphasis upon clear and expliQit rules of conduct, concepts that permit relatively little scope for the exercise of situationally-based judgment (Larmore 1987, pp.16-17). ("[P]erhaps the most obvious and astonishing absence from Aristotle's thought for any modern reader is that there is relatively little mention of rules anywhere in the Ethics" [Maclntyre 1981, p.141].) In social theory, modern concerns with explicit decision-procedures and a widespread "flight from ambiguity" and judgment (Levine 1985) have become evident in a host of analytical perspectives -- not only rational choice theory, but also less explicit yet equally rational and instrumental conceptions of social action, dating back at least to Max Weber's celebrated discussion of zweck- and wertrationalitat (Weber 1978, pp.24-26). Even Durkheim sees morality as by definition a "system of commandments," "an infinity of special rules [that are] fixed and specific." "To the extent," he writes, "that the rule leaves us free (and] does not prescribe in detail what we ought to do, the action being left to our own judgment, to that extent there is no moral valuation" (Durkheim 1961, pp.31; 25; 23-24).

Aristotelian perspectives on practical wisdom: Accordingly, it is necessary for us to turn back to premodern times -- and particularly to Aristotle -- for the most fully developed theories of prudence or practical wisdom. Aristotle links practical evaluation, or phronesis, intrinsically to questions of moral virtue. He regards it as an "intellectual virtue" consisting not in a deductive or scientific knowledge of general principles, but rather in a capacity to apply universal principles to the peculiarities of specific circumstances. "[T]hree features of 'the matter of the practical'.. .show why practical choices cannot be adequately and completely captured in a system of universal rules": the mutability of the particular; its indeterminacy (complexity and contextual variety); and its inherent non-repeatability. Also, for Aristotle the values, rules, and principles that are constitutive of a good human life are themselves plural and incommensurable; hence a concern for situated judgments supplants any simple belief in the unproblematic application of universal norms or imperatives (Nussbaum 1986, pp.303-04; 294-95). Practical wisdom, in Aristotle's view, can refer variously to means or to ends; it can be either strategic and calculative -- in which case "we speak of men as having practical wisdom in a particular respect" (i.e., of their being clever, crafty, or cunning) --or it can be concerned with broader questions of the good life itself, that is, with "what conduces toward the end" (Aristotle 1985, pp.63; 153; emphasis added; see also Cooper 1975; Wiggins 1980). ₁₅ Not unrelatedly, practical wisdom itself is seen by Aristotle as intrinsically communicative in nature; that is, it entails a deep involvement and participation in an ongoing community of discourse. Far from being purely individual or monological, as mere cunning would be, it remains open to dialogue and persuasion, and is profoundly implicated in common values, interests, and purposes. Not surprisingly, Aristotle draws a clear analogy here between phronesis and the art of rhetoric, which he depicts similarly as immersed in concrete particularities. Both phronesis and rhetoric concern themselves, he holds, with perplexities of action in the midst of highly complex, ambiguous, and contingent circumstances. ₁₆

Kant's account of practical judgment: A significant break with this legacy comes about only with Kantian ethics. Kant regards prudence not as a virtue, as did so many moral theorists before him, but rather as a vehicle for cold and selfish calculation, expediency, and pragmatism (see Kant 1956, pp.16; 37-38; 1964, p.83). And yet, especially in his later work (e.g., 1965/1971, pp.389-90), even he indirectly provides a theory of practical evaluation. In the Critique of Judgment (1951; see Beiner 1983), Kant distinguishes between "determinate" and "reflective" judgments; determinant judgments merely subsume the particular under a rule or universal already given for it, while reflective judgments are "compelled to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal" (Kant 1951, p.18). For Kant, logical and moral judgments belong to the former category, while judgments of taste belong to the latter, and necessarily involve practical evaluation. (It is precisely here that Kant suggests a way of reconciling, both in theory and practice, the dualisms of subject and object, structure and moral action, that he had delineated in his two previous Critiques.) Significantly, Kant adds that judgments of taste fall within the potentiality of all persons, since they "depend.. .on our presupposing the existence of a common sense [sensus communis]" (Kant 1951, p.83). Kant links such "common sense" to what he calls the capacity for "enlarged mentality," "a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (apriori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind (Kant 1951, p.151)." Such judgment is carried out by abstracting from one's own limited experience in order to put oneself in the position of everyone else (and thus to deliberate over the collective good). Such an idea of an "enlarged mentality" both recalls Aristotle's notion of a community of discourse -- a preeminently communicative extension of the idea of practical evaluation -- and the more distinctively modern theme of autonomy, since judgment no longer depends upon the subjectivity and caprice of concrete individuals.

Theories of rule-following and improvisation: Several other important conceptions of practical evaluation have emerged over the course of the twentieth century. These may roughly be divided into theories that abandon the close connection between practical evaluation, communication, and moral reasoning, and those that insist on retaining it. Prominent among the former is the work of the later Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations (1965) focuses upon the rules governing "language games, ways of life," and taken-for-granted background understandings. On the one hand, Wittgenstein suggests that following such rules is simply a matter of habitual implementation (or iteration, as we termed it above): "When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly" (Wittgenstein 1953, p.85). But on the other hand, rule-following is for him also quite unlike the operations of a machine. The rules of language games are typically inexact and "open-textured" (Turner 1994, p.73), and as such permit of a wide degree of adaptability and responsiveness to novel circumstances. This insight, of course, leads us back again to Aristotle, as the philosopher Charles Taylor points out: "A rule doesn't [just] apply itself; it has to be applied, and this may involve difficult, finely tuned judgments... There is, as it were, a crucial 'phronetic gap' between the formula and its enactment" (Taylor 1993, p.57). Where Wittgenstein diverges from Aristotle, of course --as well as from Kant and (as we shall see) from feminist theorists -- is in his unwillingness to associate practical evaluation necessarily with moral excellence and the good life. Situation-bound interpretations of rules are for him less a matter of moral goodness than an intrinsic feature of all practical action as such. Wittgenstein further loses the critical Kantian ideal of an "enlarged mentality" or sensus communis, as well as Aristotle's distinctive emphases upon rhetoric, persuasion, and the cultivation of practical wisdom.

The same separation of practical evaluation from questions of moral goodness marks the writings of latter-day theorists of practice such as Bourdieu and Giddens. Bourdieu draw's explicitly on Aristotle in developing his conception of habitus: "The practical knowledge [which the habitus] procures," he argues, "may be described by analogy with Aristotle's phronesis" (Wacquant and Bourdieu 1992, p.128). For his own part, Giddens (1984), too, stresses the adaptability of practical consciousness to the particular and ambiguous nature of life-circumstances. The rules of social life" themselves he defines "as generalizable procedures applied in the enactment/reproduction of social life" (Giddens 1984, p.21). In a recent article, William H. Sewell, Jr. elaborates upon these tendencies in his own critical synthesis of Bourdieu and Giddens (1992). In modern societies, he asserts, actors are faced with the often challenging task of determining which from among "a wide range of different and even incompatible schemas" (or as we add, projects), each of them rooted in different structural contexts or circumstances, is most appropriate to the particular case at hand. They are also faced with determining how best to proceed in circumstances dissimilar to the ones with which they are most familiar: "Knowledge of a rule or a schema by definition means the ability to transpose [them] or extend [them] -- that is, to apply [them] creatively" (Sewell 1992, pp.16; 18). Such improvisational theories of rule-following clearly advance well beyond Kantian and Aristotelian perspectives in generalizing from moral (or aesthetic) to virtually all types of contextualized judgment. Yet they also narrow the boundaries of practical evaluation by focusing upon implicit, tacit forms of activity, such as the analogical transposition of received schemas, and thereby minimizing the reflective, deliberative, and critical dimensions of the concept.

Theories of critical deliberation: Examples of theories that fully embrace the critical and dialogic aspects of practical-evaluation -- as stressed by Aristotle (in his analyses of the art of rhetoric) and Kant (in his idea of the sensus communis) -- can be found in the important writings of John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Jurgen Habermas. Dewey subsumes Kant's insights on reflective judgment into his own pragmatistic theory of judgment. In "The Logic of Judgments of Practice" (1985), he points out that all such judgments begin with a problematic experience, a "fork in the road," which they attempt experimentally to resolve. Judgments gain intersubjective validity from assuming the standpoint of a sensus communis, "a whole of common interests and purposes" (1)ewey 1978, p.286; see also Gregg 1994). Arendt also expands upon Kant by maintaining that despite the latter's focus upon aesthetics, reflective judgment represents "the most political of man's mental abilities" (Arendt 1984, p.36). Of special importance to her is the notion of an enlarged mentality, which she terms "representative thinking"; she describes this as an "ability to see things [from] the perspective of all those who happen to be present," "an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I inust finally come to some agreement" (Arendt 1977a, pp.221; 220; see also Arendt 1977b; Benhabib 1992a). And finally, Habermas (1990, 1993) builds upon Kant's doctrine of judgment while insisting that he is correcting Kant's ethical rigorism. He distinguishes between the "discourse of justification" (concerned with the validity or justice of norms) and the "discourse of application"; "'the right thing to do in the given circumstances' cannot be decided by a single act of justification -- or within the boundaries of a single kind of argumentation -- but calls for a two-stage process of argument consisting of justification followed by application of norms" (Habermas 1993, p.36). It is significant that Habermas retains a Kantian emphasis upon deliberation and intersubjective validity, even as he objects to the emptiness of Kantian ethics itself. ₁₇

Among those who critically draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian outlooks are contemporary feminist thinkers who link practical evaluation to moral reasoning, and associate it with the particular capacities, experiences, and histories of women. Emblematic of such theories is Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982), which stresses gender differences in the use of situated reasoning as opposed to abstract, formalistic, and universalistic moral reasoning, and thereby seeks to overcome the rationalistic limitations of Kantian conceptions of moral judgment and action (e.g., Kohlberg 1981). "The psychology of women," writes Gilligan, "that has consistently been described as distinctive in its greater orientation toward relationships and interdependenceL,] implies a more contextual mode of judgment and a different moral understanding" (Gilligan 1982, pp.21; 22; see also Kittay and Meyers 1987). Another significant figure in this debate is Seyla Benhabib, who stresses processes of dialogue and public deliberation in her own communicative conception of practical judgment. Such "discourse ethics" are foreign to individualistic and decisionistic modes of choice-making, and yet they provide reflexive and democratic procedures for deliberating over the appropriateness and rightness of judgments (as well as for arriving at the best solutions). Benhabib suggests that contextual judgments and universalistic morality can be deeply intertwined: there is "no incompatibility between the exercise of moral intuition guided by an egalitarian and universalist model of moral conversation [Kant] and the exercise of contextual judgment [Aristotle]" (Benhabib 1992b, p.54; see also Benhabib 1987, 1992c).

The internal structure of practical evaluation

As the foregoing discussion demonstrates, practical evaluation as a concept features a rich, lengthy, and many-sided history. It is associated with many different forms of activity: with moral, political, and aesthetic judgment as well as with general modes of practical consciousness and action; with expansive ideals of universality, together with more restrictive notions of language games, gendered identities, and class positions; with cleverness and calculation, and yet also with enlarged thinking and public deliberation. Here we contend that the primary locus of agency in its practical-evaluative dimension lies in the communicative reflection on social experience (see Figure 2). It is through communication with others (or sometimes, self-reflexively, with oneself) about the pragmatic and normative exigencies of lived situations that actors gain the capacity to make considered decisions that may challenge received patterns of action. This communicative dimension of agency is what distinguishes the "strong" situational moment of deliberative decision-making from the "weak" situatedness of what we call, in the iterational dimension, tacit maneuver. By increasing their capacity for practical-evaluation, actors strengthen their ability to exercise agency in a mediating fashion, enabling them (at least potentially) to pursue their projects in ways that may challenge and transform the temporal-relational contexts of action themselves (although, given the contingency and uncertainty of interactions, the consequences of their actions cannot ultimately be controlled). In the paragraphs that follow, we reconstruct the internal structure of practical evaluation, and show how certain of its aspects are implicated in all of the manifestations mentioned above.

Problematization: The first analytical component of practical evaluation consists in the recognition that the concrete, particular situation at hand is somehow ambiguous, unsettled, or unresolved. In the case of projects, this entails the apprehension of present reality as resistant -- at least to some degree -- to their immediate and effortless realization. Even relatively congenial environments present (by their very nature as targets and terrains for action) immediate challenges in application or contextualization. In the case of iterational or habitual activity, there is also the problem that no new situation is ever precisely the same as ones that came before; all routine activity faces new contingencies to which certain adjustments have to be made. Hence the critical challenge of "analogical transposition" raised explicitly by Sewell and addressed as well by Bourdieu and Giddens. The classical pragmatists were most keenly aware of the significance of this issue; Dewey refers to it as the objective "incompleteness" of situations: "This incompleteness is not psychical. Something is 'there,' but what is there does not constitute the entire objective situation... .The logical implication is that of a subject-matter as yet unterminated, unfinished, or not wholly given" (Dewey 1985, p.15). Something must be done -- some practical judgment arrived at -- that will render the given situation unproblematic, settled, and resolved.

Characterization: The problematic circumstances at hand must in turn be related to schemas, principles, or projects by which they are characterized in some fashion. Does the situation in question call for the activation of a particular iterational or habitual activity? Does it call for the performance of a specific duty, or present itself as a context in which the pursuit of a particular project of action is appropriate or even possible? Speaking in specific reference to moral situations, Benhabib (1992a) terms this the problem of "epistemic identification" (while Aristotle calls it "perception" or "understanding," and Kant discusses it under the rubric of reflective judgment). It requires "responding to nuance and fine shading, adapting [one's] judgment to the matter at hand in a way that principles [or schemas of action] set up in advance have a hard time doing" (Nussbaum 1986, p.301). Judgments of this nature are emotional (or "passional") as well as cognitive: "Perception is a complex response of the entire personality....To have correct perception of the death of a loved one is not simply to take note of this fact with intellect or judgment" (Nussbaum 1986, p.309). This is no contradiction, once the emotions are seen (with Aristotle) as themselves "intelligent," educable, and inseparable from intellectual life.

Deliberation: Plausible choices must be weighed in the light of practical perceptions and understandings, against the backdrop of broader fields of possibilities and aspirations. Deliberation thus involves more than unreflective adjustment of habitual patterns of action to the concrete demands of the present; it also entails (at least potentially) a conscious, searching consideration of how best to respond to situational contingencies in light of broader goals and projects. While often employing strategic reasoning or means-ends rationality, it sometimes also requires attention to "what conduces to the end" (Aristotle 1985, p.63; emphasis added); it therefore entails further specification of habits and projects as well as determination of the specific means for actualizing them. Moreover, deliberation applies to conflict among alternative possible ends no less than it does to the contextualization of singular ends. It thus involves a search for the proper course of action to follow under ambiguous circumstances. Finally, deliberation (much like characterization itself) entails emotional engagement with the particularities of situations. It stands "on the borderline between the intellectual and :the passional, partaking of both natures: it can be described as either desiderative deliberation or deliberative desire" (Nussbaum 1986, pp.307-08; see also Shalin 1993). Deliberation can take place individualistically or discursively, monologically or within public spaces, recalling the Kantian ideal (as elaborated by Dewey and Arendt) of an "enlarged mentality."

Decision: Deliberation aims toward decision (or choice), the resolution to act here and now in a particular way. In certain cases, such resolution entails a highly discrete or circumscribed choice: an actor "finally arrives at a decision." In other cases, it blends indiscriminately into the "flow" or duree of practical activity, and is only clearly perceived after the fact (see footnote 13). In all of these cases, it points in the direction of action within the circumstances of the present, and yields a resolution to translate engagement with such circumstances (11owever passional or implicit) into concrete, empirical intervention. It should be noted that not all choices reflect unambiguous strategies. Certain decisions are provisional, tenuous, and opportunistic, as we shall see below; they may also engage (in a synthetic or polysemous manner) with more than one problematic situation simultaneously. Nor do all decisions (like deliberation itself) lend themselves to easy formulation and explication., Choices can be a matter of tacit adjustment or adaptation to changing contingencies (as thinkers from Wittgenstein to Sewell would have it), as well as the product of articulable, explicit reasoning.

Execution: If deliberation entails consideration or planning, and decision marks a movement toward concrete action, then executive capacity is that capacity "to do the things that tend towards the mark that we have set before ourselves" (Aristotle 1985, p.169). It is a capacity to act rightly and appropriately within particular, concrete life-circumstances. One must not only grasp what one ought to do, but also how best to set about it in the case at hand. To respond "at the right times, with reference t6 the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this [is what] is characteristic of excellence" (Aristotle 1985, p.44). While Aristotle sets this notion within the framework of a theory of ethics and of human excellence, even he acknowledges that not only virtuous persons but all human actors are capable of possessing executive skills, or "cleverness." "If the mark be noble, the cleverness is laudable, but if the mark be bad, the cleverness is mere smartness" (Aristotle 1985, p.169). With execution or action, the "arc" of practical evaluation is complete: not only deliberation and decision (or judgment), but execution as well is required for the contextualization of our habits, ends, duties, and projects.

Having dissected the internal structure of practical evaluation, we can now once again relate this analytical dimension of agency to its other two components. Here too we can speak of the "minor tones" of the chordal triad -- those which, in this case, characterize the actor's orientations toward the past and future, respectively. The social actor's relationship to the past is based upon the problematization of past experience, in which the inability of past patterns to resolve the conflicts, dilemmas, and ambiguities of emerging situations gives rise to the need for critical reflection and judgment. In the other direction, the relationship with the future is characterized by deliberation over possible trajectories of action, a communicative process by means of which actors attempt to choose from among alternative hypothetical scenarios by critically evaluating the consequences of implementing these within real world situations. It is through this dynamic of problematization and deliberation that actors arrive, more or less consciously (and, at times, almost retrospectively [see footnote 13]) at both practical decision-making and moral choice.

Practical evalution in empidcal research

As with the previous two dimensions of agency, the concept of practical-evaluation reveals a particular analytical aspect of empirical social action. The question remains as to how, as an agentic process, this aspect emerges in different empirical actions and social practices. In this section, we outline a diversity of research findings that pertain to practical evaluation. While these examples by no means represent the only ones available, together they help to convey a clearer sense of what is entailed by this aspect of human agency and of how it can be investigated sociologically.

Temporal improvisation: One set of studies includes empirical research into "sequencing" processes -- for example, Bourdieu's investigations of the "manipulation" of the "temporal structure of gift exchange." "The same act," explains Bourdieu, such as "giving, giving in return, offering one's services, paying a visit, etc., can have completely different meanings at different times, coming as it may at the right or the wrong moment" (Bourdieu 1977, p.6). Temporal strategies that enable actors to "remain in command of the interval between [these] obligatory moments" -- for example, by "holding back or putting off, maintaining suspense or expectation," or otherwise manipulating the "tempos" of action -- allow them to gain significant material and/or symbolic advantages vis-a-vis their partners in exchange (Bourdieu 1977, pp.15; 7; italics in original). Bourdieu points out that the skillful manipulation of time requires "practical mastery of the symbolism of social interaction -- tact, dexterity, savoir-faire -- [as is] presupposed by the most everyday games of sociability" (Bourdieu 1977, p.10). He shows how it requires a certain capacity to "play on all the resources inherent in the ambiguities and uncertainties of behavior and situation in order to produce the actions appropriate to" it (Bourdieu 1977, p.8). Additional examples of temporal improvisation -- albeit on a different level of analysis -- include "turn-taking" patterns exhibited among "adjacency pairs" in everyday conversational interactions. Practitioners of "conversation analysis" in the tradition of Schutz and Garfinkel (Sacks 1964-72; Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 1968; Schegloff and Sacks 1973; see also Atkinson and Heritage 1984) investigate the subtleties of timing and delay in the social organization of talk, showing at a micro-level how agentic manipulations of time allow actors to engage in "repair-work," to avoid or (alternatively) initiate conflict, and in myriad other ways to advance their own interests.

Resistance, subversion, and contention: Yet another opening for practical judgment is made possible by the "procedures and ruses" (to quote Michel de Certeau) by which actors, as both consumers and producers, actively resist and subvert the logics and practices of the established order. The "arts of using" revolve around "a logic of the operation of actions relative to types of situations... [a situational] logic which turns on particular, concrete] circumstances" (De Certeau 1984, p.21; italics in original). Such tactics are "always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized 'on the wing,"' for openings "offered by the particular situation"; they utilize an "art of placing blows," of "getting around the rules of a constraining space" (De Certeau 1984, pp.xix-xx; 18). One additional writer who explores these "tactics of resistance" of oppressed groups and individuals is James Scott (1985, 1990). In his studies of Malay villagers, as well as in broader contexts of slavery, serfdom, caste subordination, colonialism, racism, and patriarchal domination, he uncovers strikingly similar patterns of dissent from what he terms (echoing Goffman [1959]) "official" or "public transcripts." "[R]umors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, jokes, and theater of the powerless" are merely some of the "vehicles by which, among other things, [the powerless) insinuate a critique of power while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct" (Scott 1990, p.xiii). Jeffrey Goldfarb (1989), too, discusses the tactics of resistance of oppressed Eastern Europeans under Soviet domination during the final years of the Cold War. And Charles Tilly (1986, 1992) examines more open instances of resistance and collective action; he underscores the shrewdness, tact, and situational awareness of individuals and groups who "perform in dramas [repertoires of contention] in which they already know their approximate parts, [1)ut] during which they nevertheless improvise constantly" (Tilly 1992, p.15; for another study of practical evaluation in collective action, see Macy 1993).

Local or prudential action: Another window of opportunity for practical evaluation arises in those structural situations in which no clear expectations for action apply in the first place --settings in which, as Eric Leifer puts it, "roles are not 'givens' that constrain interaction, but [rather] something that actors must acquire through interaction" (Leifer 1988, p.865). These settings (or "pockets") of role ambiguity necessitate "local action," which allows actors in "face-to-face competition with others who have similar credentials.. to avoid claiming a (global) role until there is evidence [that such a role] will be conferred" (Leifer 1988, pp.865; 866). Local action entails attempts at a prolonged (in principle, indefinite) maintenance of "strategic balance," in which no overarching role structure is unequivocally set forth, accepted, or rejected by relevant others. A powerful illustration of this is provided by John Padgett and Christopher Ansell's (1993) study of the rise of the Medici family in early modern Florence. Cosimo de Medici, they argue, hardly pursued some omniscient "grand strategy" in the course of the power struggles of his day, but rather engaged in "robust" or prudential action, shrewdly and opportunistically taking advantage of the local "openings" that a succession of exogenous events had fortuitously brought his way. Padgett and Ansell complicate Leifer's model of local action by speaking of "an entire linked ecology of games, each game layered on top of another," rather than of one single, unitary game. But both accounts concur on the importance of "flexible opportunism -- maintaining discretionary options across unforseeable futures in the face of hostile attempts by others to narrow those options" (Padgett and Ansell 1993, pp.1264f; 1263).

Political leadership: The empirical analysis of political leadership takes on a different form in the work of such authors as Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986) and Alfred Stepan (1978) on the breakdown of -- and transitions to -- democracy. These writers describe open-ended and contingent sequences of action, and underscore the uncertainties and multiple possibilities confronting actors at each stage of such complex, reversible processes. Whether they be "hard-liners," "soft-liners," oppositional publics, or military men, political leaders require "good.. .judgment to test the limits of a situation" (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986, p.27). More counterfactually, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1978, ch. 11) also engages in an analysis of leadership in his celebrated discussion of "the suppression of historical alternatives" in Germany after World War I. He asks what courses of action Friedrich Ebert and other leaders of that period might have pursued ("Was a different policy possible?" "Why was it not attempted?" "How about alternative tactics, strategy, and timing?") that might have led to a more stable regime than the Weimar Republic, and thereby avoided the Holocaust. Such analyses, moreover, need not always focus upon legitimate leaderships; Leon Trotsky's (1980) assessment of the pivotal role that Lenin played in the making of the Russian Revolution is a classic case in point. More recently, Timothy Garton Ash (1990) has analyzed the decisive yet almost "seat-of-the-pants" way in which leaders of the "Velvet Revolution" such as Vaclav Havel orchestrated and channelled events in Czechoslovakia during the crucial months of mid-1989. A statement by O'Donnell and Schmitter applies equally well to all such empirical cases: "[U]nexpected events [fortuna], insufficient information, hurried and audacious choices, confusion about motives and interests, plasticity, and even indefinition of political identities, as well as the talents of specific individuals [virtu], are frequently decisive in determining.. outcomes" (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986, p.S).

Deliberation in publics: Perhaps the most important of all potential applications ofjudgment, and by extension of the capacity for human agency itself, is deliberation over the proper, appropriate ends of action -- over what "conduces" to these ends. Empirical studies of "publics in history" (Emirbayer and Sheller 1995) closely examine such agentic processes of "representative thinking" and collective deliberation. One such study is Jane Mansbridge's (1983) ethnography of a New England town meeting in "Selby," Vermont, and of an urban crisis center ("Helpline") in "a major American city." Mansbridge shows how "The men and women I interviewed.. .made heroic efforts to live up to their ideals, reformulating them as they discovered their limitations through painful experience" (Mansbridge 1983, p.xiii). She concludes that "in contexts where citizens have primarily common interests," at least, citizen boards can be made to work with "members.. .chosen for their good judgment... [and drawn] from any segment of the community whose experience can contribute to solving common problems" (Mansbridge 1983, p.x). Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow, and James Coleman also examine the internal dynamics of participatory workplaces in their classic sociological study, Union Democracy (1962). More recently, analysts such as Alain Touraine, Francois Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki (1983), Lawrence Goodwyn (1991), and Roman Laba (1991) have investigated the processes of collective deliberation that prevailed at the grass-roots level during the "Solidarity" movement in Poland, 1980-81. They have demonstrated how Polish citizens arrived at judgments regarding the very nature of their movement, its ultimate ends, and even the ideals to which they aspired, through democratic discourse, dialogue, and debate within public spaces.

 

Agentic Orientations and the Contexts of Action

In this final section we discuss one of the primary advantages of an analytically distinct concept of agency as we have elaborated it in this paper: namely, that it allows us to see variation and change in the "agentic orientations" of actors in relation to the different structural contexts of action. By disaggregating the internal dimensions of agency, we can identify orientations that are more iterational, more projective, and/or more evaluative; we can additionally see how actors in different temporal-relational contexts (as embodied in specific "fields of practice") may move back and forth between orientations in which one or another dimension of agency is the "dominant tone." In this way we can analyze how actors increase or decrease their abilities to mediate the constraining and enabling aspects of structural contexts, and in so doing, change their own potentialities for inventiveness and critical choice vis-à-vis the structural environments in which they act.

Our focus on cross-context changes in agentic orientations highlights a host of research questions that are scarcely visible when agency and structure are seen either in opposition or as "mutually constitutive" in a direct and simple way. In the sections that follow we suggest three possible lines of research into the interplay between agency and temporal-relational contexts: (1) variations in agentic orientation across contexts; (2) changes in orientation as actors move between contexts; and (3) mediations by changing actors of the structural contexts of action themselves.

Variations across structural contexts

How do agentic orientations vary in response to different societal, cultural, and psychological contexts of action? In this section we hold the actors steady, so to speak, and focus upon the contexts themselves; for a variety of reasons, certain forms of temporal-relational organization are more conducive to iterational, projective, and/or evaluative activity than others. Moreover, as contexts change historically, agentic orientations might change accordingly. This scenario raises at least two subsets of research questions:

Contextual support: The assumption here is that structural contexts themselves support (or "recruit for") particular agentic orientations. Since agentic orientations as we have analyzed them express (at least in part) different temporal relationships, one crucial research area concerns how specific ways of organizing time might give "form" to particular types of iterational, projective, or practical-evaluative activity. Research questions that focus analytically on each of the three contexts of action might include the following:

• Do different cultural constructions of time affect actors' responses to given contexts? Here work in linguistic anthropology on cross-cultural differences in temporal constructions (e.g., Hallowell 1937; Whorf 1956) might provide leads on how the organization of time within language affects agentic orientations.
• Does the temporal organization of societal or institutional settings (e.g., schedules, careers, rhythms, cycles) promote particular forms of iterational, projective, or practical-evaluative activity? This question has particular relevance for the study of families, schools, and workplaces (Zerubavel 1979).
• Do long-lasting psychological patterns of temporal expectation affect the ability of actors to negotiate problematic situations? Work on the temporal constructions corresponding to different developmental stages (e.g., Erikson 1963) might provide insight into the emotional underpinnings of agentic orientations.

Historical change: When contexts change historically -- such as through war, regime change, economic cycles, natural disasters, or other exogenous influences -- the agentic orientations of actors may also change; as actors confront newly problematic situations, action repertoires primarily dominated by past routines sometimes change into a purposeful search for alternatives, or vice versa. However, the relationship between changing contexts and agentic orientations is not straightforward, and needs to be subjected to careful empirical scrutiny. For example, while actors in "unsettled times," as Swidler (1986) tells us, might be more likely to engage in projective activity (as expressed in ideologies and utopias), this strong future orientation also at times inhibits their responsiveness to the practical exigencies of changing situations (such as the demands of alliance-building or negotiated arrangements). Later stages in the change process might, on the other hand, bring practical negotiators and institution-builders to the fore. Other actors might avoid changes altogether and instead hold tightly to past routines (such as national or local traditions) in attempts to ward off uncertainty. Careful attention to the agentic responses of actors to changing circumstances might thus provide insights into such phenomena as revolutionary movements and xenophobic nationalism, as well as into the tensions between actors with different orientations (such as the "hardliners" and "pragmatists" during regime transitions [O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986]).

Switches between structural contexts

One key to understanding the range and dynamism of agentic orientations lies in the fact that actors can be immersed in multiple temporal-relational contexts simultaneously. This is reminiscent of Goffman's (1974) stress on the "multiple embeddings" of situations in different "frames," or vantage points on action; we would extend Goffman's imagery by saying that it is possible to be (primarily) iterational in one frame, projective in another, and practical-evaluative in yet a third. Moreover, as actors move between and among fields of practice, they alternate between agentic orientations, leading to a number of interesting phenomena for empirical research:

Zapping: One such phenomenon can be described as "zapping" (White 1993, 1995), the switching of actors back and forth (either unseif-consciously or deliberately) between fields of temporal-relational organization embodying different linguistic, social, and affective configurations (e.g., family, school, work, recreational activity). For White, such moves across both networks and discursive realms (and we would add, psychological patterns) is an integral aspect of social life: "Within any social regime, in any era, persons.. are always shifting, or attempting to shift, from one set of ties [or realm of discourse], to another, in concert and/or alone" (White 1995, p.4-S). Research can explore changes in agentic orientations (and hence in the flexibility of response to structural environments) as actors switch between fields of practice that are more or less conducive to iterational, projective, or deliberative activity. Studies in code switching and changes in "register" among language users (Gal 1979; Gal 1987; Mertz 1993) point us in this direction (although such work has not yet focused on agentic orientations per se). Another example is recent reconceptualizations of "personality" in situational terms (Mischel and Shoda 1995; Shoda, Mischel, and Wright 1994). Mischel et al. show how actors (in their case, children in a summer camp) consistently change their behavioral patterns according to certain situational variables (e.g., interactions with other children and adults). They point directly toward our conception of agentic orientations by observing that actors may be able to control and change their own behavioral patterns by avoiding situations in which they tend to be bound by particular affective and social routines (or habits), and striving instead to place themselves within (or "switch into") situations in which they are more projective or goal-oriented.

Brokerage: The concept of situational switches in agentic orientations opens up a new perspective on the phenomena of "brokerage," which has long been discussed as one of the examples par excellance of agentic activity. Anthropologists such as Wolf (1956), Geerta (1960), and Boissevain (1974), and, recently, network theorists such as Marsden (1982) and Gould and Fernandez (1989) have examined the important brokerage role played by "interstitial" actors capable of negotiating between or at the edge of overlapping structures. These entrepreneurial figures often control access to information, resources, and clientage that are essential to the local consolidation of political and economic power, giving them a genuine shaping role upon structural contexts. One question for research is whether they gain this heightened capacity for maneuvering and purposive action from the capacity to switch back and forth between the different temporal-relational fields of practice (and the agentic orientations associated with them). For example, are actors at the intersection of a variety of fields of practice more prone to projectivity and deliberation, given the greater availabifity of resources for hypothetical rearrangement and comparative evaluation? Does the capacity to draw, when needed, upon different forms of routinized relationships, or conversely, to purposively manipulate, extend, or transpose these across contexts, underlie their ability to gain greater control and directivity over the various fields of practice in which they act? Mische's (1994) work on "interlocutor" figures among Brazilian youth activists and their role in the reformulation of social projects across organizational networks provides some leads in this direction (see also Gibson and Mische 1995).

Mediations of structural contexts

While we focus above on switches between fields of practice, even within fields multiple orientations may interanimate each other (in Bakhtin's [1981] resonant term), facilitating processes of reflection and learning. To build again upon Goffman, we argue that individual and collective learning is facilitated by the superimposition of different temporal-relational contexts (or frames), making possible what Goffman calls "transformations" (as bridges between frames). It is precisely the overlay of temporal-relational contexts within particular fields that provides material (so to speak) for self-reflexive changes in agentic orientations, which in turn alter the ability of actors to respond to (and potentially to transform) contexts of action. Here the analytical emphasis shifts to mediations of structural contexts by actors who are themselves undergoing changes; agentic orientations and contexts of action are (re-)constructed coterminously across temporally evolving interactions.

Reflective learning: An important research area concerns how, by subjecting their own agentic capacities to imaginative recomposition and critical judgment, actors may "loosen" themselves from past patterns and reframe their relationships to existing constraints. A classic example is Freudian psychoanalysis, in which interpretive recollection of past experiences has a liberating effect upon action; Ricoeur (1970) points out that this process is projective as well, suggesting research on how temporal orientations are intermingled (and undergo changes) in therapeutic pocesses. Mische (1993) examines such retrospective-projective reflection by showing how changes in temporal orientation play an important role in inverting context-generated fatalism; as young people in a Harlem writers group discuss their experiences and aspirations with a distinguished mentor, they gradually expand their sense of open-ended possibilities, while grappling with the practical difficulties of "crossing between worlds." Research along these lines can examine how the "mixing" (i.e., interanimation) of networks, ideals, and emotional responses within such "world-crossing" experiences can assist actors in moving from primarily iterational orientations to those in which alternatives are actively imagined and pursued (helping them to discover flexibility in contexts that they had previously regarded as fixed and inevitable). At the societal (rather than individual) level, examples of such reframing processes can be seen in the social movement concept of "cognitive liberation" (McAdam 1982), as well as in studies of "collective learning,"in which actors change their orientatiors in response to institutional practices that prove harmful or undesirable, thereby supporting conscious attempts at social reform (e.g., those leading to liberalization and democratization; see Casanova 1987; Arato 1993).

Contextual reform: Another significant research area is suggested by attempts of actors to deliberately create new cultural and organizational contexts in pursuit of particular social objectives. Such efforts show the possibility of agentic influence in the processes of "double constitution" referred to earlier, that is, in the establishment of cultural, societal, and psychological environments that support particular agentic orientations. Again, a creative role is played here by the construction of bridges between contexts, as exemplified (in the case of cultural contexts) by research on framing processes within "cycles of protest" (Tarrow 1989; Snow and Benford 1992). Innovative "master frames" are often created by activists early in a cycle through processes of alignment, extension, and transformation of existing frames; these then go on to shape styles of collective action (involving projective and practical-evaluative activity) later in the cycle. Likewise, Moore (1994) shows how new social movement organizations are created in the attempt to bridge conflicting institutional identities (e.g., scientific and political); moreover, deliberative framing processes early in an organization's history help to routinize varying capacities of actors to respond innovatively to changing contexts. The role of bridging in contextual reform is also seen in DiMaggio's (1991) work; he shows how museum reformers' creation of a professional environment at the interorganizational level has led to more critical discourse, formal equality, and purposeful search for alternatives (in contrast to the routine, hierarchy, and practical rationality that predominates inside organizations). These example suggest further research on how particular agentic orientations support and interanimate each other; a certain amount of routinization may be necessary to sustain projective and evaluative activity. Along these lines, Emirbayer (1992a, 1992b) examines how educational reformers in antebellum and Progressive America struggled to construct new curricular and pedagogical contexts that would inculcate the "moral habits" needed to sustain a virtuous citizenry; here we see the projective activity of reformers engaged in establishing "iterational" supports for particular forms of democratic (in Dewey's terms, imaginative and deliberative) activity.

 

Conclusion

We have argued throughout this paper that human agency needs to be radically reconceptualized. Neither structuration theory, rational choice theory, nor any of the sociological approaches extant today provide a fully adequate understanding of its significance and constituent features. Nor do such perspectives satisfactorily answer the question as to how agency interpenetrates with and impacts upon cultural, societal, and psychological structures.

Our own contention has been that one key to understanding the variable orientations of agency toward its structural contexts lies in a more adequate theorization of the temporal nature of human experience. Actors are always living simultaneously in the past, present, and future, and adjusting the various temporalities of their empirical existence to one another (and to their empirical circumstances) in more or less imaginative and reflective ways. They are always engaging patterns and repertoires from the past, projecting hypothetical pathways forward in time, and adjusting their actions to the exigencies of emerging situations. Moreover, there are times and places when actors are more reliant upon the past, more directive toward the future, and more evaluative of the present; actors may switch between (and reflexively transform) their orientations toward action, thereby changing their degrees of flexible, inventive, and critical response to structuring contexts. Such a perspective lays the basis for a richer and more dynamic understanding of the capacity of actors to mediate the structuring environments within which action unfolds.

 

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Note 1: It should be noted that in the pages that follow, on the other hand, we do not lay out a normative theory that actually distinguishes between "better" or "worse" agentic processes, "more or less morally worthy" projects. The elaboration of such a theory would require even longer and more complex arguments than those presented here. (Suffice it to say that any truly adequate normative framework would, in our view, combine elements from both classical pragmatism and contemporary discourse ethics.) In whatfollows, we deilneate the analytical space in which reflective and morally responsible action can be said to unfold. Back.

Note 2: Strictly speaking, Archer means by "central conflation" an elision of the two key elements of "Cultural System" and "Socio-Cultural Interaction." In what follows, we generalize from her criticisms by including in our account the social and the psychological, as well as the cultural, contexts of action. Such an approach dovetails with Archer's own, for at the very outset of her discussion (Archer 1988, p.ix) she too points out the "direct parallel[ism]" between the two problems of social structure and agency, on the one hand, and of culture and agency, on the other. On the other hand, it is also true that Archer does not think to extend this parallelism to the relationship between personality (the psychological context of action) and agency. Back.

Note 3: As Archer goes on to note, "The relationship between the levels [structure and agency] is.. analytically intractable, for there is no way in which we can break into the circuit. The levels themselves lack too little autonomy from one other [sic] to start from either and slowly disentangle its interplay with the other -- for the terminus is already present in the point of departure" (Archer 1988, p.85). Back.

Note 4: We do not, it bears pointing out, follow Parsons in prioritizing the environments or contexts of action in any sort of hierarchy, "cybernetic" or otherwise. Nor do regard them as "action systems" per se. "Concrete action cannot be analytically broken down into these three systematic elements. These [contexts,] rather, enter action as its more or less ordered environments" (Alexander 1988 a, p.316). As Alexander explains it, "action can be conceived of as a 'flow' within symbolic, social, and psychological environments. These environments interpenetrate within the concrete empirical actor, who is no longer identified with purely contingent action as he or she typically is in the traditions of micro theory" (Alexander 1988b, p.93). We depart from Alexander's formulations only in eschewing the additional step of regarding the environments of action as "systems," in the (neo-)functionalist sense of the term. Hence our replacement of "systems" in the above quotation with "contexts" (in brackets). Back.

Note 5: We employ here the terms "symbols," "positions," and "(psychical) objects" in ways corresponding to their usage, respectively, in contemporary semiotic theory, network analysis, and objects relations theory. This framework is deeply influenced in general by the "relational turn" in the social sciences, as documented by Cassirer (1923) and exemplified by such diverse thinkers as Lewin (1951), Elias (1978), Bourdieu (1992), and White (1992). Back.

Note 6: Among the many implications of this statement is that human agency cannot itself be equated with "beliefs, values, and motives," as is often the case in current varieties of structuralism and historical materialism (for an example of this error, see Emirbayer 1992a). For us, "beliefs, values, and motives" refer instead to relational contexts of action (the cultural and the psychological, in particular), themselves coequal in analytical significance with the context of social structure. Human agency, for its own part, is analytically distinct from all three of these relational contexts of action. Back.

Note 7: It should be noted that in this definition of agency, we purposefully refrain from mentioning at all the often misconceived notion of "intentionality." Our standpoint is similar to that of the American pragmatists, who see agency as something "instrumental" in the widest sense -- that is, as responsive to (and aimed at resolving) problems or obstacles to human enrichment and creative self-realization (Dewey 1978, 1981; Mead 1934). Intentionality ought not to be confused with the commonsense meaning of "intentions" as (necessarily) implying "purpose" or "will," nor with meanings it has been given in rational choice theory and analytic philosophy (although see Austin 1966; Davidson 1980). Back.

Note 8: This usage is analogous to Patterson's (1991) discussion of the "chordal triad" of freedom. Back.

Note 9: In this respect, our strategy is not unlike that of Max Weber in his celebrated fourfold distinction in Economy and Society (1978, pp.24-25) among the different categories of social action. Back.

Note 10: Loic Wacquant echoes this conception in characterizing "the body as the source of practical intentionality, as the font of intersubjective meaning grounded in the preobjective level of experience" (Wacquant 1992a, p.20). Back.

Note 11: While Giddens's notion of recursivity enables us to conceptualize how human agency works to stabilize and reproduce patterns of action, it does not show us how these patterns are generated from the influences of past experience. Back.

Note 12: Ricoeur [1970] further develops this theme of emotional engagement by pointing out the "implicit teleology" of Freudian theory: "in a direction contrary to the regressive movement psychoanalysis sets forth in theory, there must be supposed an aptitude for progression, which analytic practice puts in operation, but which the theory does not thematize" (Ricoeur 1970, p.492). Back.

Note 13: Schutz maintains that this happens with clarity only after the act itself has been completed, through ex post facto reflection; "the error is to suppose that the conscious state, which only exists after the deed is done, lies back at some 'point of duration' before the actual choice.... [T] he action, once completed, is a unity from original project to execution, regardless of the multiplicity and complexity of its component phases" (Schutz 1967, p.69). Back.

Note 14: In the formation of projects out of lived conflicts, we can see the dynamic interplay of psychological, cultural, and societal factors. Such conflicts are embedded in multiple webs of social and institutional relationships (or networks), and they are expressed by means of shared cultural narratives and collective ideals. Some are intimate in nature, such as difficulties deriving from family history, personal relationships, or professional situations; they may also have social grounding in the structure of economic opportunities, social discrimination, or geo-political events. Projects also have roots in deeper, less conscious processes of personality formation; Harre (1984), for example, shows how the self is constructed through "identity projects," which in turn may be elaborated through "life themes" (Csikszentmihalyi and Beattie 1979) that grow out of childhood stress and develop over the course of an entire lifetime. Back.

Note 15: As we shall see later in this section, many recent empirical studies of action, when drawing (implicitly) upon the idea of practical judgment, have tended to resolve this ambiguity in favor of the former, more restrictive notion. Back.

Note 16: The key features of Aristotle's theory of phronesis remain essentially intact from classical antiquity until at least the early modern period. See, for example, the writings of Aquinas (1948, pp.1384ff; 827-33); Guicciardini and Machiavelli (who both link prudenza to their guiding problematic of an eternal opposition of fortuna and virtu: Guicciardini 1965; Machiavelli 1950; Pocock 1975; Garver 1987); Hobbes (who reserves a place, however residual, for prudence, "wit," "discretion," and "goodjudgment" in Part I of The Leviathan: Hobbes 1968, pp.117; 134-38); Vico (1982, pp.4243); Smith (1969, pp.283-93; 517-37); Burke (1968, pp.70-72); and J.S. Mill (1988, pp.13444). F6r elaborations of the Aristotelian perspective in the twentieth century, see Gadamer (1992, pp.278ff); Oakeshott (1962, pp.1-36; 111-36); Taylor (1985); and Steinberger (1983). Back.

Note 17: A more ambiguous example (from within the Kantian tradition) of implicit reasoning in respect to practical evaluation is Max Weber's classic discussion of "responsible action" (Weber 1946; see also Roth and Schluchter 1979, ch.2), which requires an "open-eyed" apprehension of concrete situations and of the possible (unintended) consequences of action within them. Weber's analysis is an ambiguous one because, unlike those of Dewey, Arendt, and Habermas, it points toward a decisionistic ethics ("Here I stand; I can do no other"), and greatly downplays Kant's original vision of an "enlarged" or "representative" (Arendt) thinking. Weber fails to theorize the intersubjective processes whereby ultimate ends are themselves chosen by reflective actors in a wise and prudential fashion. Back.