Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Although ubiquitous in organization research and an undercurrent in management theory and practice, agency remains largely under-theorized. As societies and organizations face complex changes and challenges, bringing agency into the foreground can help scholars develop new perspectives on dynamics of social change, power, and responses to challenges. At the crossroad in the world of organizations, agency allows us to assess paths to, from, and of the present. As organization scholars, we can leverage the diversity of organizational research streams to develop fresh perspectives and nuances on agency.
 
As societies and organizations face complex changes and challenges – e.g., the climate crisis, structural inequity, societal polarization – bringing agency into the foreground can help scholars develop new perspectives and conceptual insights about how actors can be creative agents, change and enact change, and respond to challenges (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Sewell, 1992).
 
Human agency plays a central role in creative work, organizational and institutional change, and dealing with challenges ranging from minor issues to societal grand challenges. How actors theorize change at organizational or field levels (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Greenwood et al., 2002; Suddaby & Greenwood, 2005), develop entrepreneurial intentions, or strategize in the context of complex challenges (Hengst et al., 2020; Jarzabkowski et al., 2018), cope with novel or existing threats (i.e., military conflicts, pandemics) are all tightly connected to what it means to be an agent and act with intent.
 
Agency has been mostly described as a reflexive deviation by individuals from institutionally legitimated scripts (Steele, 2021) or as entrepreneurial intentions of acting in the face of adversity and low odds of success (Battilana et al., 2009). However, other approaches to agency exist. Groups and other collectivities may possess agency beyond any possessed by constituent members (List & Pettit, 2011). Actor Network Theory insists that humans and non-human entities such as technologies or nature have agency (Latour, 2005). Agential realism argues that how we measure and observe shapes our perception of agency (Barad, 2007). Systems psychodynamics regards individual and collective action as variously self- and/or other-authorized, enacted consciously and unconsciously, and interpreted meaningfully only when considered across levels of analysis (Wells, 1990). Each of these perspectives is underpinned by researchers’ assumptions and their ontological, epistemological, and methodological orientations (Gioia, 2022). Moreover, related to the nature or ontology of agency are its causes and consequences.
 
While research has considered different natures of agency, it has also considered different modalities of agency such as distinctions between primacy and institutional agency (Maier & Simsa, 2021), or the importance of social, institutional, cultural or network embeddedness in constraining or enable agency (e.g., Battilana, 2006; Leca & Naccache, 2006; Mische, 2011), as well as how visions of desirable future can favor the emergence of agency (Reinecke, 2018, Schiller-Merkens, 2022).
 
The diversity of organizational research examining a wide range of phenomena of creativity, change, and challenges across different contexts and theoretical lenses can yield new insights about the nature, causes, and consequences of agency. As organization scholars, we can leverage the diversity of organizational research streams to develop fresh perspectives and nuances on agency.
 
In this sub-theme, we are looking for a broad range of research projects where scholars foreground the notion of agency and/or explicitly theorize what it means to be an agent – including, but not limited to, the sources, constraints, and possibilities of agency. We welcome studies from various philosophical, theoretical, and empirical contexts. We encourage a broad range of submissions, including, but not limited to, processual (Deken et al., 2016; Hernes & Feuls, 2023) and critical accounts. We are also interested in perspectives that depart from the ‘mainstream’ approach to agency as intentional such as ANT, agential realism, and others.
 
The list below offers examples of a broad range of questions that the convenors considered in preparing this call for papers. Rather than aiming to fit within any explicit or implicit framework suggested by the questions (or the references following), authors of submissions to the sub-theme should offer their own approach to agency grounded in literature. Indeed, it is precisely because of the broad range of questions and potential approaches to agency, juxtaposed with its relative under-specification in organization and management studies, that we designed a broad call. Our hope for sub-theme participants is that greater understanding of agency will emerge through collective consideration and dialog across diversity. Whether offering depth into a narrower topic or breadth and synthesis across multiple perspectives, all submissions that foreground agency in organization are welcome.

• How do different and multiple levels of organization – micro, meso, macro – help us gain insight into agency?

• How do different categories of actors form intentions over time, and enact these?

• How do actors theorize change in the contexts characterized by contestation?

• How can we understand agency from Western, Eastern, “Global Southern”, decolonized or postcolonial, postmodern, reflexive, or other perspectives?

• How does our ontological, epistemological, and methodological orientation reveal or constrain how we understand agency?

• How do different ontological and epistemological perspectives on agency influence how we think about creativity, change, or addressing grand challenges?

• How can technological change, such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), influence, constrain, enhance, or shape agency?

• What, or who, has agency, can have agency, or can be an agent?

• What is the relationship between having agency and being an agent?

• What is revealed about agency through related concepts, such as action, authority/authorization, leadership, oppression, power, praxis, resistance, and structure?

References

• Barad K.M. (2007): Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Battilana, J. (2006): “Agency and Institutions: The Enabling Role of Individuals’ Social Position.” Organization, 13 (5), 653–676.
• Battilana, J., Leca, B., & Boxenbaum, E. (2009): “How Actors Change Institutions: Towards a Theory of Institutional Entrepreneurship.” Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 65–107.
• Deken, F., Carlile, P.R., Berends, H., & Lauche, K. (2016): “Generating Novelty Through Interdependent Routines: A Process Model of Routine Work.” Organization Science, 27 (3), 659–677.
• Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998): “What is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology, 103 (4), 962–1023.
• Gioia, D. (2022): “On the Road to Hell: Why Academia Is Viewed as Irrelevant to Practicing Managers.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 8 (2), 174–179.
• Greenwood, R., & Suddaby, R. (2006): “Institutional Entrepreneurship in Mature Fields: The Big Five Accounting Firms.” Academy of Management Journal, 49 (1), 27–48.
• Greenwood, R., Suddaby, R., & Hinings, C.R. (2002): “Theorizing Change: The Role of Professional Associations in the Transformation of Institutionalized Fields.” Academy of Management Journal, 45(1), 58–80.
• Hengst, I.-A., Jarzabkowski, P., Hoegl, M., & Muethel, M. (2020): “Toward a Process Theory of Making Sustainability Strategies Legitimate in Action.” Academy of Management Journal, 63 (1), 246–271.
• Hernes, T., & Feuls, M. (eds.) (2023): A Research Agenda for Organisational Continuity and Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., Chalkias, K., & Cacciatori, E. (2018): “Exploring Inter-organizational Paradoxes: Methodological Lessons from a Study of a Grand Challenge.” Strategic Organization, 17(1), 120–132.
• Latour, B. (2005): Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Leca, B., & Naccache, P. (2006): “A Critical Realist Approach to Institutional Entrepreneurship.” Organization, 13 (5), 627–651.
• Maier, F., & Simsa, R. (2021): “How Actors Move from Primary Agency to Institutional Agency: A Conceptual Framework and Empirical Application.” Organization, 28 (4), 555–576.
• Mische, A. (2011): “Relational Sociology, Culture, and Agency.” In: J. Scott & P.J. Carrington (eds.): SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 80–97.
• Reinecke, J. (2018): “Social Movements and Prefigurative Organizing: Confronting Entrenched Inequalities in Occupy London.” Organization Studies, 39 (9), 1299–1321.
• Schiller-Merkens, S. (2022): “Social Transformation through Prefiguration? A Multi-Political Approach of Prefiguring Alternative Infrastructures.” Historical Social Research, 47 (4), 66–90.
• Sewell, W.H. Jr. (1992): “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.
• Steele, C.W.J. (2021): “When Things Get Odd: Exploring the Interactional Choreography of Taken-for-Grantedness.” Academy of Management Review, 46 (2), 341–361.
• Suddaby, R., & Greenwood, R. (2005): “Rhetorical Strategies for Legitimacy.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(1), 35–67.
• Wells, L. Jr. (1990): “The Group as a Whole: A Systemic Socioanalytic Perspective on Interpersonal and Group Relations.” In: J. Gillette & M. McCollom (eds.): Groups in Context: A New Perspective on Group Dynamics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 49–85.