Chapter 5: Agency in State Agencies
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2-1-2017
Editor(s)
N.J. Enfield & Paul Kockelman
ISBN
9780190457211
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Language
en-US
Abstract
Does bureaucracy subsume individuality beneath a stifling commonality that makes agency impossible? If you think of agency as a heroic individualism, it might look that way. But attending to the steps of bureaucratic activity reveals that agency becomes individuated and collectivized by turns; always present, it is distributed differently at different points in the process. This continual movement may make bureaucracy the very model of distributed agency. How does this kind of activity give rise to accountability—the ascription of responsibility for exercising agency? Looking at the legal accountabilities available for bureaucratic actors shows that accountability is a perspectival construct. Whether it is available, and how it works, depend on the accountability scaffoldings provided by a specific social arena. Accountability, therefore, may inhere not in the relation of actor to action, but in the tropes provided—or ignored—by a particular social realm.
Recommended Citation
Anya Bernstein,
Chapter 5: Agency in State Agencies
,
in
Distributed Agency
41
(N.J. Enfield & Paul Kockelman ed.,
2017).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4285
Draft available on SSRN
