Departmental Papers (ASC)
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
2008
Abstract
This essay intends to recover human agency from holistic, abstract, even oppressive conceptions of social organization, common in the social sciences, social systems theory in particular. To do so, I am taking the use of language as simultaneously accompanying the performance of and constructing reality (my version of social constructivism). The essay starts with a definition of human agency in terms of its linguistic manifestation. It then sketches several leading conceptions of social organization, their metaphorical origin and entailments. Finally, it contextualizes the use of these metaphors in conversation, which leads to the main thesis of this essay that the reconstitutability of networks of conversation precedes all other criteria of the viability of organizational forms. The paper transcends the traditional second-order cybernetic preoccupation with individual cognition – observation and description – into the social domain of participation.
Keywords
Organization, Metaphors, Conversation, Agency, Reconstitution
Included in
Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Community Engagement Commons, Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, Epistemology Commons, Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons, Organizational Communication Commons, Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons, Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons
Date Posted: 26 August 2009
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
Cybernetics anf Human Knowing. Volume 15, Numbers 3-4: 149-161, 2008