ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explains how envisaging agency from a relational perspective leads us to view any acting as an acting for, with, and through. He demonstrates how this perspective can help us address the (in)famous agency-structure question because it reveals that the concept of structure always hides various forms of agency. By analyzing communicative exchanges recorded during my fieldwork on Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), he then illustrates how this relational ontology can be used to investigate processes of organizing. To conclude, he discusses how this perspective brings the "thingness" of the (organizational) world into view, and why he believe the devil term "reification" should be rehabilitated. He also shows how sociological and organizational scholarship has traditionally conceived of agency as a capacity that is restricted to human beings. He then focuses on how social theorists have historically conceptualized this notion, knowing that agency is almost always reduced to people's capacity to make a difference.
