ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the individual as an agent and influenced by, social and organizational contexts. It employs Aristotle's figure of the phronimos alongside Foucault and Arendt's focus on attitudes, dispositions, and tactics applied to the relationally situated self, to sketch those qualities of agents in global politics that cue and assist ethical reflexivity. A key argument of this chapter is that ethical reflexivity enables agency in the face of social and bureaucratic pressures and dysfunctions that tend toward non-reflective and rule-based behavior. The chapter explores that organizations co-opt challenges and innovations and subject them to routinization and systematization in diluted form. It also argues that individuals acting from within organizations have little agency or responsibility because the organization constitutes the individual; provides individuals an identity; has rules, norms and policies that are generally followed; and features collective interests that even the organization's leaders are socialized into.
