ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some larger points and trying to lay the groundwork for further debate and research. It is organized around seven dimensions of agency: (1) grantors and grantees; (2) human beings, personhood, and transcendent institutions; (3) network (re-)distribution of agency; (4) intention and intentionality; (5) identities, roles, and relationships; (6) power and effect; and (7) process. The chapter concludes briefly to a broader reflection on intellectual currents in the treatment of agency within the multidisciplinary arena of organization studies. Counting, as being able to do things in the world and as possessing even an inchoate, inherent capacity to do things, marks one important way that agency relates to power. For communication studies, enduring core concepts have included symbol, message, information, persuasion, media, campaign, network, and discourse (among others). Communication theory and social theory, including discourse-based approaches, have likewise absorbed influences from poststructuralist and postmodernist thought and have displayed important terminological shifts in the past several decades.
