[Linganth] CFP 2015 AAA Session: (In)visible Hands: Collective agencies and corporate actors

[Gregory Kohler]

Hello,

We are co-organizing a panel for the 2015 AAAs on collective agency inside
corporate and organizational settings. We are looking for other panelists
who have interesting theoretical or empirical data on attributing,
constructing, or regimenting collective agency and agents. Miyako Inoue has
agreed to be our discussant.

If interested, please email Gregory Kohler (gkohler at uci.edu) and Michael
Prentice (mprentic at umich.edu) with your potential topic or send a 250-word
abstract by March 15th.

See below for details:

_____________________


CFP for the 2015 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in
Denver.

Session: “(In)visible Hands: Collective agencies and corporate actors”
Organizers: Gregory Kohler, UC Irvine; Michael Prentice, University of
Michigan

The ambiguity of agency within corporations has been a persistent issue
since the rise of large-scale organizational forms more than 100 years ago.
Collective agency has also remained a relatively undertheorized topic
within anthropological discussions of agency. This session seeks papers
that can creatively brige these two interests, by making visible the
processes of how collective agency is constructed in corporate and
organizational settings with attention to the different kinds of semiotic
processes involved. There are three different dimensions we envision to
this.

First, collective agency and actors can be attributed through everyday
communication; "The board is deciding" "Thanks from the Management." How do
these simple attributions relate to footing, stance, or responsibility
shifts within or across situated events? How might everyday instances of
invoking collective agents differ cross-linguistically or within specific
institutional histories?

Second, collective agency can be the product of complex human activity and
material networks, such as the production and circulation of documents. How
is collective agency created through the work of different kinds of actors
across situated events and technologies? What rituals, materials or other
techniques are involved? How is individual agency co-constructed or elided
in the process?

Third, collective agency can be defined through internal rules, external
regulations, or prescriptive theories. While much focus has been paid to
legal theorizations, different corporate actors or institutions play roles
in imagining and delimiting collective agency for practical purposes, such
as Human Resources departments, safety inspectors, financiers, or ratings
agencies. How are formal discourses about corporate agencies in these
contexts conceptualized or regimented?

By looking at corporations in a range of cultural contexts, we are seeking
panelists who investigate the construction and invocation of collective
agency as a socio-cultural phenomenon, as an emergent process, or as part
of different kinds of normative discourses.
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