ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how conceptions of agency inspired by relationality can inform pressing social and organizational problems. It outlines two developing perspectives on agency that reflect the turn toward relationality and challenge the common view. The first emanates from conceptions of performativity — specifically, Michel Callon's work on agencement; and the second stems from affect theory — specifically, Kathleen Stewart's formulation of ordinary affects. For each, the chapter introduces the basic contours of the perspective with respect to agency, considers how the perspective implicates communication, and read the bathroom controversy through that lens. The chapter concludes by comparing the respective potential of our two perspectives on agency to enrich organization studies. Ultimately, it demonstrates how performativity and affect summon new understandings of communication, and how cultivating communication accordingly promises significant theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions to the relational turn.
