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The article introduces the issue which includes papers on archetypes, intentionality, and agency taken from the conference entitled "Neuroscience and Analytical Psychology: Archetypes, Intentionality, Action and Symbols" which was held on January 24, 2009 in Milan, Italy.

This special section on global development has been developed from a conference roundtable event run by the Development Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society. In this special section, we (some of the committee) introduce the four papers and their critical contributions to emerging debates. These extend early work on how the "global" is being made, focusing on the projects of multilateral development agencies and state institutions to examine how (and whether) the rebranding of "international development" as "global development" constitutes a shift in thinking and practice. Together, the papers draw our attention to the considerable opportunities and implications that this reframing offers, while highlighting that critical attention is required as to how that framing is deployed and by whom. They reveal disparity between global development as a much‐needed reframing of power, agency, and progress and global development as produced by mainstream development actors and interventions, necessitating more critical research into how this normative agenda is adopted and enacted in dominant policy and practice. In this introduction to the special section on global development, we introduce the four papers and their critical contributions to emerging debates. These papers analyse how the "global" is being made, focusing on the projects of multilateral development agencies and state institutions. They examine how (and whether) the rebranding of "international development" as "global development" constitutes a shift in thinking and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophical discussion on control has largely centred around control over our actions and beliefs. Yet this overlooks the question of whether we also have control over the reasons for which we act and believe. To date, the overriding assumption appears to be that we do not, and with seemingly good reason. We cannot choose to act for a reason and acting‐for‐a‐reason is not itself something we do. While some have challenged this in the case of reasons for action, these claims seem especially untenable regarding believing for a reason. And extending the scope of control in this way also faces the threat of regress. In the face of this orthodoxy, the present paper argues that we do in fact have control over both believing and acting for a particular reason. It also starts to develop an account of the way in which this would be possible. Given the broad importance of understanding control and agency, this paper bears on a number of topics in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which current interpretations of the notion of agency, as traditionally perceived under human rights law, pose challenges to human rights protection in light of algorithmic surveillance. After examining the notion of agency under the European Convention on Human Rights as a criterion for applications' admissibility, the paper looks into the safeguards of notification and of redress – crucial safeguards developed by the Court in secret surveillance cases – which are used as examples to illustrate their insufficiency in light of algorithmic surveillance. The use of algorithms creates new surveillance methods and challenges fundamental presuppositions on the notion of agency in human rights protection. Focusing on the victim status does not provide a viable solution to problems arising from the use of Artificial Intelligence in state surveillance. The paper thus raises questions for further research concluding that a new way of thinking about agency for the protection of human rights in the context of algorithmic surveillance is needed in order to offer effective protection to individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This survey paper interrogates four theoretical frameworks often invoked to analyze intersections between media and religion: mediatization, mediation of meaning, mediation of the beyond, and religious social shaping of technology. The paper surveys several research works informed by the aforementioned theories that study Pentecostals' engagement with different forms of media in Africa. This paper suggests that these theories need to be revised to provide a balanced assessment of Pentecostalism and media technologies. Advancements in technology, particularly sophisticated of algorithms, transformed media into an intelligent and dynamic space that enormously influences media consumers. The theory of mediatization gave power and agency to media logic. However, the other theories (mediation of meaning, mediation of the beyond, and religious social shaping of technology) focused on human agency and saw media as an inert space with many features that users can use as they see fit. To remedy this unbalanced relationship, the paper calls for a new theory that accounts for the agency of both the users and the media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the region's diverse peoples and unique environments, Arctic political analyses frequently remain focused on the traditional level of the state and inter‐state relations. While states undoubtedly play a significant role in Arctic governance arrangements, this paper seeks to direct attention to the agency of the many people and actors performing politics in the region. A more 'peopled' analysis includes renewed attention to professionals – e.g., state personnel, politicians, and diplomats – as well as non‐state actors involved in Arctic politics through different avenues and with different levels of agency. This paper focuses on the so‐called Barents Cooperation, a peace‐building initiative set up in the wake of the Cold War between Nordic states and Russia in the Barents Euro‐Arctic border region. It draws on interviews with professionals involved in the daily running of the Barents Cooperation, including its funding of 'grassroots' and people‐to‐people activities, to ask what can lessons can be learnt about Arctic political participation beyond the state. Based on their reflections, key challenges, successes, and future opportunities are highlighted, and the paper argues for strengthening both the analytical attention to and the practical agency of a wider range of political actors. Geopolitical analyses frequently remain focused on the traditional level of the state and inter‐state relations. While states undoubtedly play a significant role in Arctic governance arrangements, this paper seeks to direct attention to the agency of the many people and actors performing politics in the region, focusing on the political initiative The Barents Cooperation. The paper argues for strengthening both the analytical attention to and the practical agency of a wider range of political actors in geopolitical analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article questions digital agency as a subjective experience of refugees when crossing Europe's external and internal borders. More concretely, the article asks how refugees experience digital agency, and how this concrete experience is constituted in specific border practices. In doing so, it examines the contradictions that arise between European laws and human rights in the context of border practices. The analysis of the data of this paper reflects two important components of digital agency: the sense of ownership and control of one's body and actions, and the capacity to think independently and thus make considered choices. This study is based on a qualitative research approach based on narrative interviews. The data was imported to MAXQDA, a software package that allows data to be efficiently collected, organised, analysed and visualised electronically. The article shows how refugees and asylum seekers, when crossing the border to Europe, do not simply enter another country, but a (powerful) institutional system. In having their biometric and digital data collected, they are confronted with several practices of border and risk management that have become routinised and thus ‘normalised’ on an institutional level. Thus, their digital agency must be understood as precarious, underscored by an installed coercive environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper defends a version of the view that agency is a causal power, the “causing view.” After sketching the view, and explaining how it differs from its rivals, various challenges are assessed. A family of objections says that causing change is neither necessary nor sufficient for acting. The second challenge centers on an Aristotelian thesis about the relation between an action (A's opening a window) and the corresponding passion (the window's being opened by A). The final objection concerns the dynamic nature of acting: the claim is that a causal view of agency cannot accommodate actions “in progress” or mere activity. I conclude that none of the objections examined presents unsurmountable problems for the causal view of agency which, at least in the version here defended, remains a highly plausible and attractive view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where does creativity come from and what is its purpose? The paper revisits these ever‐turning questions to correct the prevalent but, arguably, inaccurate historical interpretation of creativity as a concept that emerged in modernity. First, I substantiate that a close study of the ancient Greek texts suggests that although creativity seems to occupy a peripheral position in the ancient philosophical thinking, it is a central, yet, hidden, subject of speculation. Second, I overturn the worn‐out view that the ancient Greek philosophy conceives creativity as a God‐given talent breathed into a fortunate few. Last, I demonstrate that a more encompassing understanding of creativity is implied by several Greek philosophers. To achieve this, (a) I discuss the contemporary interpretations of the ancient notion; (b) I examine the historical origin and etymology of the Greek term demiourgein ("to create") to discuss its relevant uses; and (c) I develop a nuanced framework for conceptualizing ancient creativity and its interrelation to human agency, politics, and social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meaning and Linguistic Variation: The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics is a collection of works published in a variety of edited collections, journals, and conference proceedings. It also includes one unpublished conference paper. The collection traces the (ongoing) development of the concept of social meaning in language variation in 11 different papers. These are contextualized with personal reflections on variationist sociolinguistics and the profession of linguistics that frame each paper. This review article highlights some of the key themes in the collection: As well as social meaning itself, issues with style, clustering of variables, peripheral and core members of communities, and agency are discussed. Eckert's innovative proposal that variables can be differentiated on the basis of their relative "interiority" is considered, as is the assertion that linguistics transcends the referential properties of language to include the expressive and moral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people perceive the minds of organizations? Existing work on organizational mind perception highlights two key debates: whether organizational groups are ascribed more agency than experience, and whether people are really perceiving minds in organizational groups at all. Our current paper and its data weigh in on these debates and suggest that organizations can indeed be ascribed experiential minds. We present a "member and goals" framework for systematically understanding the mind perception of organization. This framework suggests that people can perceive the organizational mind through its elemental building blocks: members (people who form the organization) and goals (its aims). Four studies reveal that people ascribe agency and experience to organizations based on whether the members of organizations and the goals of the organization are characterized by agency or experience. Study 1 finds that past work on mind perception often examines for‐profit corporations, which consist of agentic members (corporate professionals) and agentic goals (market competition). Studies 2 and 3 reveal that when an organization with members and goals high (vs. low) in experience, people imbue its mind with perceived experience—equal to that of a person—and that even emotions low in warmth (i.e., anger) can imbue an organization with such perceptions. Study 4 shows the moral consequences of emphasizing experience: after organizational wrongdoing, experiential organizations are seen to deliver more sincere apologies and are more forgiven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Disasters is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the gradual evolution of the French Régulation school (FR) for the study of capitalism through the lens of structure and agency. The analysis first segments the school into two epochs, the early Régulation, led by authors Aglietta and Lipietz, and the later Régulation, which saw the rise of Boyer. We find that the gradual progression that occurred within the FR school is linked to its authors' implicit ontic engagement with structure and agency, which, in turn, provides natural linkages to Critical Realism. In the second part of the paper, we demonstrate how the comparison between Morphogenetic Régulation and French Régulation (FR) can facilitate a much deeper reading of the structure‐agency debate pertaining to the transformation of capitalism. In so doing, it discusses the value addedness of Morphogenetic Régulation through three specific concepts by stressing their relevance for contemporary studies in international political economy. These concepts are: stratified emergence; causality and the problématique of hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first identifies and then provides a novel analysis of a feature of anorexia nervosa (AN) that has gone overlooked in the philosophy of psychiatry literature. This feature is the discrepancy between first‐personal experiences of anorexic food restriction and the clinical descriptions of these same behaviors at the level of agentive awareness. I develop a positive account of the sense of agency in AN that accommodates current empirical findings while also providing valuable insight into how it is that anorexics can sincerely report feeling fully in control over their food restriction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Geographical debates surrounding labour have hitherto tended to sideline its discursivity – that is its ongoing construction as a category of the economy – and the politics of the discourses of labour involved in this process. To address this lacuna, this paper engages with three bodies of scholarship in the social sciences which explicitly foreground the discursive construction of labour: work on subjectivity and power in the labour process; feminist investigations into gendered globalization processes; and studies on the discursive power of labour. These reveal labour discourses as multiscalar phenomena that operate at workplaces, as mechanisms of work organization and control within transnational capital circuits, as knowledge networks that underpin how labour is valued, and as resources for labour agency. The paper closes by proposing a distinctively geographical research agenda which involves mapping the discursive geographies of labour, examining how labour discourses are 'placed' and encountered, and exploring their role in building geographies of labour agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti‐dualistic social ontologies, those highlighting the intrinsic interdependency of agency and structure as two sides of the same coin, are sometimes criticized for failing to provide a satisfactory account of autonomous – capable and free – agency, or even denying the reality of such agency. This paper contests these claims, arguing that anti‐dualistic ontologies only conflict with autonomous agency when the latter is understood in a highly voluntaristic sense, whose ideational roots go to what philosophers of free will call "incompatibilist" intuitions of freedom. Those intuitions suggest that actions (intentions, decisions) ultimately determined by extrinsic causes lack the kind of freedom presupposed by moral responsibility, so when agentive autonomy is presumed to involve such freedom, it does indeed cohere poorly with the anti‐dualistic picture of intrinsically structured agency. Herein, however, an alternative, "compatibilist" notion of autonomy is advanced, such that does not conflict with extrinsic determination and is therefore congruent with anti‐dualistic social ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of People & Nature is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Sociolinguistics is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The prohibition on lying is often thought to be very stringent. Some have even been tempted to think that it is absolute. In contrast, the prohibition on other forms of deception seems to be looser. This paper explores the relationship between the duty not to deceive and the duty not to lie. This discussion is situated in the context of a broadly Kantian account of morality. Kant himself infamously claimed that one ought not lie to a murderer at the door about the location of his intended victim. This paper aims to explain how a broadly Kantian view can endorse a distinctive duty not to lie without thereby being committed to this kind of conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper argues that for sustainable product innovation to make a contribution to addressing sustainability issues, we need to understand not only why consumers adopt sustainable products but also what makes them use these in sustainable way. To explain how specific product features can change the ways in which consumers engage with sustainable products in the adoption and usage phase, we draw on affordance theory. Affordances refer to the potential for agentic action of users in relation to a technological object. We develop a conceptual framework that explains how sustainable product innovation can lead to the design of sustainability affordances that stimulate adoption and sustainable usage. The framework shows how three forms of agency—material, firm, and user agency—interact and together influence a product's sustainability affordances that drive adoption and a change in consumer behavior. The framework explains how trade‐offs between a product's environmental features and consumer expectations regarding desired functionalities and user experience can be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children, like adults, understand that human agents can flexibly choose different actions in different contexts, and they evaluate these agents based on such choices. However, little is known about children's tendencies to attribute the capacity to choose to robots, despite increased contact with robotic agents. In this paper, we compare 5‐ to 7‐year‐old children's and adults' attributions of free choice to a robot and to a human child by using a series of tasks measuring agency attribution, action prediction, and choice attribution. In morally neutral scenarios, children ascribed similar levels of free choice to the robot and the human, while adults were more likely to ascribe free choice to the human. For morally relevant scenarios, however, both age groups considered the robot's actions to be more constrained than the human's actions. These findings demonstrate that children and adults hold a nuanced understanding of free choice that is sensitive to both the agent type and constraints within a given scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have attempted to justify various courts' position that bare or naked statistical evidence is not sufficient for findings of liability. I provide a particular explanation by examining a different, but related, issue about when and why stereotyping is wrong. One natural explanation of wrongness of stereotyping appeals to agency. However, this has been scrutinised. In this paper, I argue that we should broaden our understanding of when and how our agency can be undermined. In particular, I argue that when we take seriously that our agency is exercised in the social world, we can see that stereotyping can and does undermine our agency by fixing the social meaning of our choices and actions as well as by reducing the quality and the kinds of choices that are available to us. Although this improves the agency‐based explanation, it must be noted that undermining agency is not an overriding reason against stereotyping. Much depends on the balance of reasons that take into account moral stakes involved in a case of stereotyping. This results in a messier picture of when and why stereotyping is wrong, but I argue that this is a feature, not a bug. I end by applying this agency‐based explanation to cases that have motivated the so‐called Proof Paradoxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper argues that the principles of instrumental rationality apply primarily to extended action through time. Most philosophers assume that rational requirements and principles govern in the first instance momentary mental states, as opposed to governing extended intentional actions directly. In the case of instrumental rationality, the relevant mental states or attitudes would typically be preferences, decisions, or intentions. In fact, even those who recognize the extended nature of our agency still assume that rational requirements apply primarily to mental states at a moment in time. Such views try to do justice to the extended nature of our agency by postulating rational requirements that apply in the first instance to plans, policies, and intentions more generally. The paper focuses on the central case of requirements and reasons governing the reconsideration of intentions and argues that these requirements or reasons are either superfluous or invalid. I argue that a proper conception of instrumental reasoning that applies directly to actions turn out to have surprising consequences. In fact, this conception allows us to see that policies, projects and the like are best understood as instances of extended actions, and that the instrumental requirements that apply to projects and policies are exactly the same as the instrumental requirements that apply to ordinary extended actions. Finally, I argue that the resulting theory of instrumental rationality is a significant improvement over theories that rely on principles governing intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows that structure and agency are components of both micro and macro articulations of identity (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). However, some scholars (e.g., Block 2013, 2015; Sealey and Carter 2004; Gao 2017) argue that structure and agency often receive unequal attention, with many studies focusing more on agency when examining identity work. This paper attempts to rectify this imbalance by adopting a chronotopic approach to examine quantitative variation in Chinese Indonesian college students' (non)‐use of the Chinese discourse particle a to construct interactional positions. The resulting analysis highlights how speakers' interactional positions align with established macro structures of Chineseness and Indonesianness, and also present new local structures. Patterns in different speakers' invocation of structures in interaction correlates with their socialization histories, involving exposure to particular social categories and ideologies. Ultimately, this approach better represents structure and agency as mutually constituted factors in identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superficially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and critical realism (CR) are radically opposed research traditions. Written from a realist perspective, this paper asks whether there might be a basis for finding common ground between these two traditions. It looks in turn at the questions of realism, structure, and agency, analysing the differences between the two perspectives and seeking to identify what each might learn from the other. Overall, the paper argues that there is a great deal that realists can learn from actor network theory; yet ANT remains stunted by its lack of a depth ontology. It fails to recognize the significance of mechanisms, and of their dependence on emergence, and thus lacks both dimensions of the depth that is characteristic of critical realism's ontology. This prevents ANT from recognizing the role and powers of social structure; but on the other hand, realists would do well to heed ANT's call for us to trace the connections through which structures are constantly made and remade. A lack of ontological depth also underpins ANT's practice of treating human and non-human actors symmetrically, yet this remains a valuable provocation to sociologists who neglect non-human entities entirely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of preventive anti‐corruption agencies (ACAs) has been a significant public administration regulatory trend of the last two decades. This article endeavors to better understand how preventive ACAs build inter‐agency collaboration and legitimacy. Rather than analyzing ACAs in isolation, this article proposes a novel understanding of autonomy‐building by accounting for the underlying reputational dimension of their broader collaborative environment: ACAs need to strike a delicate equilibrium between defending their organizational uniqueness and effectively collaborating to tackle the complexity of corruption. To achieve this, the article employs a mixed‐methods multiple case study of four preventive ACAs in Quebec (Canada) over the last decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is bodily awareness a condition on bodily action? I approach this question by weaving an argument based on considerations from action theory, the phenomenology of embodied agency, and from the psychology and neuroscience of action. In this paper, I discuss two accounts on which bodily awareness is a condition on bodily action. The first is an influential philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy, which claims that bodily awareness is necessary for the online control of bodily action. I argue that there are empirical counterexamples to O'Shaughnessy's account. Instead I propose an account on which the capacity for bodily awareness is a condition on our capacity for ordinary bodily action. This alternative account does justice to the causal and functional character of ordinary bodily action as well as its phenomenology. It is also consistent with the psychology and neuroscience of action. I provide a two‐stage argument for my view. The first stage shows that a sense of the spatial possibilities of one's body is a condition on intentionally acting with one's body. The second stage demonstrates that bodily awareness is a condition on a normal afferented agent's sense of the actions open to him through examining the role of bodily awareness in motor imagery and the role of motor imagery in preparatory processes for everyday actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: On the assumption that genuinely normative demands concern things connected in some way to our agency, i.e. what we exercise in doing things with or for reasons, epistemologists face an important question: are there genuine epistemic norms governing belief, and if so where in the vicinity of belief are we to find the requisite cognitive agency? Extant accounts of cognitive agency tend to focus on belief itself or the event of belief‐formation to answer this question, to the exclusion of the activity of maintaining a system of beliefs. This paper argues that a full account of epistemic normativity will need to make sense of this activity as a core locus of cognitive agency. This idea is used to motivate the conclusion that one important and often overlooked kind of epistemic norms is the kind of norms governing the various cognitive activities by which we check, sustain, and adjust our belief systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has three aims. The first is to subject to critical analysis the intractable debate between realists and anti-realists about the status of the so-called (moral) self, a debate that traverses various academic disciplines and discursive fields. Realism about selves has fallen on hard times of late, and the second aim of this paper is to get it back on track. Traditional substantive conceptions of the self contain ontological baggage that many moderns will be loath to carry. This paper settles for a more moderate aim, a “softer” kind of self-realism derived from an unlikely source—Hume—and outlines the Humean moral self and its possible advantages. The third and subsidiary aim is to challenge the view that recent “narrative” conceptions of selfhood have made the old realism versus anti-realism debate redundant. “Narrativism” about selves turns out to do little more than recycle old arguments in fancy new packages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Analytical Psychology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Building on influential work in virtue ethics, this collection of essays examines the categories of self, person, and anthropology as foci for comparative analysis. The papers unite reflections on theory and method with descriptive work that addresses thinkers from the modern West, Christian and Jewish Late Antiquity, early China, and other settings. The introduction sets out central methodological issues that are subsequently taken up in each essay, including the origin of the categories through which comparison proceeds, the status of these categories in the process of comparison, and the goals of comparison. In considering the question of goals, the introduction draws connections between comparative study and historical study within one tradition. Both types of analysis can bridge the gap between historical and normative work by attending to the ways in which the questions a scholar asks—not just the answers found—vary from one context to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Sociology of Childhood has generated a significant literature that illustrates children's agency in a wide range of contexts and settings but which oversimplifies the notion of agency. This paper develops Paul Hoggett's work on agency in the context of disadvantage to demonstrate the ways in which young people's agency is contingent on time and environmental contexts. We argue that the agency that marginalised young people enact can both implicitly pay homage to neo-liberal ideals of individual autonomy and self, while simultaneously resisting other neo-liberal ideals relating to parental and family responsibilities. This ambiguity in young people's relationship to neo-liberal ideals highlights a contradiction inherent in the same ideals, where expectations of young people with respect to their human capital development are placed uneasily alongside the notion that families are key socialising agents of young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hope is a ubiquitous feature of human experience, but there has been relatively little scholarship within contemporary analytic philosophy devoted to the systematic analysis of its nature and value. In the last decade, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of hope and, in particular, its role in human agency. This scholarly attention reflects an ambivalence about hope's effects. While the possession of hope can have salutary consequences, it can also make the agent vulnerable to certain kinds of personal risk. The pervasiveness of hope is not a sign of its quality; only a well-tuned hope can be a virtue. Recently, Nancy Snow has argued that hope can be an intellectual virtue. Framing her account as a contribution to regulative epistemology, she contends that the intellectual virtue of hope can (i) motivate the pursuit of important epistemic ends, (ii) create dispositions that enable the successful pursuit of these aims, and (iii) generate a method for enduring intellectual projects. In this paper, I provide a critical appraisal of Snow's account of hope as an intellectual virtue. One important implication of this critique is that hope can function as an intellectual virtue only to the extent that it has benefitted from the correcting and perfecting influence of other cognitive excellences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological, economic and evolutionary paradigms of human agency have often seen social agents either as the rational controllers of their fate or as marionettes on the strings of historical, functional or adaptive necessity. They found it therefore difficult to account for the variability, intentionality and creativity of human behaviour and for its frequently redundant or harmful results. This paper argues that human agency is a product of evolution, but that genetic variation and inheritance can only provide a limited explanation of its complex nature. The primary evolutionary problem which human agents face while they are alive is not to adapt to stable environments, but to respond flexibly and creatively to a contingent, uncertain world. Variation and selection therefore take two connected but distinct forms, one external, genetic, and inherited across generations, the other internal and cognitive, and operating during the lifetime of individuals. An examination of this lived part of evolution provides a better understanding of key properties of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our longitudinal qualitative research program examining doctoral student, post-PhD researcher and new lecturer experience is situated in an international literature documenting how early career academics learn through experience. In common with others, our work is framed within an identity perspective. What makes our view of identity distinct is a biographical focus: emphasizing individual agency; situating academic work within the personal arena; and encompassing transitions across roles. This paper demonstrates how the construct of 'identity-trajectory' which links a narrative approach with identity construction contributes to understanding how early career academics learn through experience and navigate their journeys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state is one of series of concepts (capitalism, patriarchy and class being others) which pose a particular kind of ontological difficulty and provoke a particular kind of ontological controversy - for it is far from self-evident that the object or entity to which they refer is in any obvious sense 'real'. In this paper I make the case for developing a distinct political ontology of the state which builds from such a reflection. In the process, I argue that the state is neither real nor fictitious, but 'as if real' - a conceptual abstraction whose value is best seen as an open analytical question. Thus understood, the state possesses no agency per se though it serves to define and construct a series of contexts within which political agency is both authorized (in the name of the state) and enacted (by those thereby authorized). The state is thus revealed as a dynamic institutional complex whose unity is at best partial, the constantly evolving outcome of unifying tendencies and dis-unifying counter-tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the ways in which young children collaboratively use narrative play and the available space and materials around them in order to exert cultural agency. The collaborative creation of texts is asserted as central to this expression of agency. By presenting an illustrative vignette of a group of 5-year-old boys as they engage in literacy practices and create a range of meaningful texts within an early years compulsory education setting, the ways in which agency is expressed through the collaborative venture of text creation is explored. The vignette follows an episode of self-initiated dramatic play, fuelled by the children's desire to engage in peer culture and make meanings collaboratively. This play episode spurs the creation of a range of hybridised texts, which culminate in the production of a written narrative. Observations from this study are then used to add to a broader discussion, which raises concerns about the current policy in England, which views early writing development as a set of individual and predefined set of skills to be acquired, a view which could undervalue the experiences that children bring to early educational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a puzzling feature of social conventions: the fact that they are both arbitrary and normative. We examine how this tension is addressed in sociological accounts of conventional phenomena. Traditional approaches tend to generate either synchronic accounts that fail to consider the arbitrariness of conventions, or diachronic accounts that miss central aspects of their normativity. As a remedy, we propose a processual conception that considers conventions as both the outcome and material cause of much human activity. This conceptualization, which borrows from the économie des conventions as well as critical realism, provides a novel perspective on how conventions are nested and defined, and on how they are established, maintained and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some scientists who study animals have emphasized the need to focus on the 'point of view' of the animals they are studying. This methodological shift has led to animals being credited with much more agency than is warranted. However, as critics suggest, on the one hand, the 'perspective' of another being rests mostly upon 'sympathetic projection,' and may be difficult to apply to unfamiliar beings, such as bees or even flowers. On the other hand, the very notion of agency still conveys its classic understanding as intentional, rational, and premeditated, and is still embedded in humanist and Christian conceptions of human exceptionalism. This paper seeks, in the first part, to investigate the practical link between these two notions and the problems they raise. In the second part, following the work of two historians of science who have revisited Darwin's studies of orchids and their pollinators, it will observe a shift in the meaning of the concept of agency. Indeed, creatures may appear as 'secret agents' as long as we adopt a conventional definition of agency based on subjective experience and autonomous intention. However, when reframed in the terms of ' agencement' - an assemblage that produces 'agentivity' - agency seems to be much more extensively shared in the living world. We will then explore some of the concrete situations in which these agencements are manifested, and through which creatures of different species become, one for another and one with another, companion-agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are inherent tensions between government policy on adult social care work in England and the practice of that care work. This paper locates these tensions within the masculine model of professionalization contained in English adult social care policy and its interpretation by a largely female workforce. We situate our analysis within critical realism, exploring street - level bureaucracy in manager and care worker policy interpretations. We argue that their exercise of agency draws substantially upon gender structures. Managers espouse policy while reproducing gender to construct care work as low in skill and status. Care workers, whose views are often neglected, transform gender to resist this positioning of their work. Our contribution is to question policy's effectiveness given its disregard of gender and its consequent disconnect from those practising adult social care. In so doing, we also advance understanding of street - level bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the evolution of the electronic marketplace in China from 1998 to 2010. According to an application of actor network theory and institutional theory, the e-marketplace was co-constructed and institutionalized by various participating actors in interwoven diffusion and legitimation processes. A content analysis of news articles reveals key actors who helped develop and shape the e-marketplace: consumers, online vendors, online criminals, technology companies, transaction platforms, entrepreneurs, professional associations, banks, and the government. The analysis of their interrelationships and major events reveals four distinct stages in the institutionalization of the e-marketplace in China: novelty, incubating, empowering, and growth. Unique problems emerge at each stage, and different types of actors enter the actor network at different phases, playing unique roles in the co-creation process to establish cultural, normative, and regulatory legitimacy. Many varied agents participated in a transformational process specific to the macro-socioeconomic and technological environment of China, which featured particular institutional forms. eBay's failure to maintain a first-mover advantage in China helps illustrate that global companies must understand political, economic, cultural, and institutional environments before considering expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists are increasingly directing attention toward social responses to climate change. As is true of any new field of inquiry, theoretical frameworks guiding the research to date have room for improvement. One advance could be achieved through closer engagement with Reflexivity Theory, particularly the work of Margaret Archer, who asks just how individuals come to give attention to certain problems, and formulate responses to them. Individuals vary significantly in regard to their understanding of and concern for anthropogenic climate change, and these standpoints in turn influence commitment to mitigation and adaptation. The emergent social interactions among all such agents in turn influence the morphogenetic trajectories through which social structures will evolve, but the role of 'meta-reflexives' is particularly crucial. Identifying pathways of individual climate change reflexivity can make a valuable contribution to our understanding of the potential for and nature of collective responses. In this paper, I explore climate change reflexivity, with particular attention to climate change meta-reflexives, through a qualitative analysis of personal interviews with residents of two small communities in Alberta, Canada. Applying Reflexivity Theory to this context articulates dimensions of reflexive processing not elaborated in current theoretical treatments, including future outlook and comfort with uncertainty, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the advances in understanding central features of agency made by the contemporary philosophers of action. It informs that the advancements are made in the field of action, intention, freedom of the will, moral responsibility, and autonomy. It further informs that the benefit will be seen by keeping firmly in mind some subtle distinctions.

A literary criticism of the book "Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance and Agency" by John Doris is presented. Topics include the author's decision to make donations to charities and causes, the need for philosophers to tackle the influence of minor issues on important decisions, agency, and the factors affecting human civilization.

In this paper I will give an analysis of what I call ‘generalizing detached self-reference’ within a general account of reference to the first person. With generalizing detached self-reference an agent attributes properties to a range of individuals by putting himself into their shoes, or simulating them. I will show that generalizing detached self-reference plays an important role in the semantics of natural language, in particular in the English generic one and in what syntacticians call arbitrary PRO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the turn to risk within sociology and to survey the relationship between structure and agency as conceived by popular strands of risk theorizing. To this end, we appraise the risk society, culture of fear and governmentality perspectives and we consider the different imaginings of the citizen constructed by each of these approaches. The paper goes on to explore what each of these visions of citizenship implies for understandings of the structure/agency dynamic as it pertains to the question of reflexivity. In order to transcend uni-dimensional notions of citizenship and to reinvigorate sociological debates about risk, we call for conceptual analyses that are contextually rooted. Exampling the importance of knowledge contests around contemporary security threats and warnings of the deleterious effects of pre-emptive modes of regulation that derive from the ‘risk turn’ within social science, we argue for a more nuanced embrace of reflexivity within risk theorising in order to facilitate a more dynamic critique of the images of citizenship that such theorizing promotes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present a new argument against internalist theories of practical reason. My argument is inpired by Frank Jackson’s celebrated Knowledge Argument. I ask what will happen when an agent experiences pain for the first time. Such an agent, I argue, will gain new normative knowledge that internalism cannot explain. This argument presents a similar difficulty for other subjectivist and constructivist theories of practical reason and value. I end by suggesting that some debates in meta-ethics and in the philosophy of mind might be more closely intertwined than philosophers in either area would like to believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a partial justification of so-called “deontological restrictions.” Specifically it defends the “self/other asymmetry,” that we are morally obligated to treat our own agency, and thus its results, as specially important. The argument rests on a picture of moral obligation of a broadly Kantian sort. In particular, it rests on the basic normative assumption that our fundamental obligations are determined by the principles which a rational being as such would follow. These include principles which it is not essential for rational beings to accept, but acceptance of which we could non-arbitrarily attribute to them simply in their capacity as rational. Among these principles is the asymmetry mentioned above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harry Frankfurt dramatically shaped the debates over freedom and responsibility by arguing that the sort of freedom germane to responsibility does not involve the freedom to do otherwise. His argument turns upon an example meant to disprove the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Debate over Frankfurt's argument has turned almost exclusively on the success of the example meant to defeat it. But there is more to Frankfurt's argument than the example in question, and this is not widely recognized. Inattention to these other aspects of Frankfurt's argument has distorted the force of it. In this paper I shall explore avenues for both refuting and advancing Frankfurt's argument that look beyond the examples. These further considerations invite us to think in broader terms about moral responsibility's nature and the sort of freedom required for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]