ABSTRACT
The ordinary, practical quality of constructive agency requires one to methodologically tolerate the tension between culture and nature, attending to the mundane resolutions of practitioners. While on the one hand Peter R. Ibarra and John I. Kitsuse seem to catapult squarely into persuasive culture to argue their brand of social constructionism, their accompanying attraction to the language of the ordinary, on the other hand, suggests that a cautious naturalism is indicated. Practice provides an analytic context that tolerates simultaneously both Ibarra and Kitsuse's vocabulary of agency and their contrasting overture to the vernacular. The sense of the agent and the audience contrasts with the ontological tone of other terms— vernacular, mundane, member, and practical — telling exceptions to the foregoing vocabulary. It is not that these terms cannot refer to publicity and the rhetorician engaged in ordinary and practical activities, as agents might appear if conduct were analyzed as the everyday work of constructing social problems.
