The Capacity To Act And The Ability To Move: Studying Agency

The Capacity to Act and the Ability to Move: Studying Agency in Social Movement Organizing

Management Communication Quarterly 2015, Vol. 29(3), 481-486. The article explores the concept of agency within social movement organizing, emphasizing its multifaceted nature. Agency is positioned as the capacity to act, which is central to understanding social change and transformation. Campbell's fourfold formulation of communicative agency—communal, participative, protean, and promiscuous—is used as a framework to analyze how agency functions and evolves, particularly in the context of contemporary digital communication and social movements.

Traditionally, agency has been viewed through a modernist lens as an attribute of autonomous individuals. However, Campbell challenges this perspective by highlighting the social and collective dimensions of agency. She argues that agency is constituted by external social structures, such as institutional orders, intersecting identities, and relations of hegemony. This communal and participative view underscores that agency flows through societal networks and collective actions.

Campbell’s later emphasis on the promiscuous and protean qualities of communication extends these ideas into a more complex domain. Promiscuity describes communication as creating uncontrolled, manifold connections, while protean denotes its autonomous and decoupled nature, which can both reinforce and subvert power relations. These qualities help articulate an event ontology grounded in Deleuzian philosophy, emphasizing becoming, continual assemblage, and transformation, thus framing agency as enacted through ongoing events rather than fixed entities.

Understanding communicative agency as promiscuous and protean allows for a more nuanced view of social movements and their outcomes. It stretches the traditional focus on immediate or material results, highlighting affective, instrumental, and constitutive effects. For instance, movements like Stonewall or contemporary protests often generate emotional identification and reshape social identities, which are critical but less immediately quantifiable. These outcomes demonstrate the complex, hybrid, and multi-scalar processes through which social movements impact society.

The digital age has further complicated these dynamics. Digital communication's protean and eventful nature can render movements seem post-political or commercially driven, as Dean (2005) suggests. Yet, this protean communication also offers opportunities for resistance and political efficacy. It allows movements to operate across multiple spaces—physical, digital, legal—and to reterritorialize events in different contexts, thereby challenging static notions of power and control.

Examining the capacity to move within this framework entails recognizing movement as an agentic process, capable of transforming, impacting, and reconfiguring social realities. The outcomes of social movements are diverse and provisional, encompassing instrumental change (policy reform), affective shifts (emotional solidarity), and constitutive transformations (identity reshaping). These effects are often embedded within complex, hybrid networks of cultural practices, legal systems, technological platforms, and activist bodies, which exemplify the eventful, multi-nodal nature of contemporary social movements.

New methodological approaches are essential for studying these complex phenomena. Traditional qualitative or quantitative methods are insufficient alone; instead, integrating ethnography, historical analysis, visual methods, and emerging fields like cultural analytics can provide deeper insights. For example, big data analysis and digital visualizations offer new ways to understand the movement of social movements across multiple nodes and layers. These innovative approaches enable scholars to trace the assemblage and territorialization of events, connecting local moments to global processes in real time.

In conclusion, viewing agency as promiscuous and protean within an event ontology broadens our understanding of social movement organizing. It underscores that agency is unpredictable, multi-scalar, and fundamentally tied to ongoing processes of becoming. Recognizing the complex, hybrid, and eventful nature of communication and movement actions challenges static conceptions of social change, highlighting the importance of flexible, multidisciplinary methodologies. As digital technologies continue to evolve, scholars must remain attentive to the possibilities for resistance, transformation, and the ongoing reassembly of social realities through agency.

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