Comm

Management Communication Quarterly 2015, Vol. 29(3) 481 –486

© The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0893318915586220

mcq.sagepub.com

Forum Essay

The Capacity to Act and the Ability to Move: Studying Agency in Social Movement Organizing

Shiv Ganesh1

It is not an accident that the word “agency” is sometimes synonymous in popular parlance with the word organization itself. As a theoretical concern, agency is a thread that runs through most propositions about communicative praxis and organizing; indeed, it lies at the heart of tensions between modern- ist and postmodern accounts that have animated organizational communica- tion research for more than two decades (Mumby, 1997). Scholars concerned with the ability of organizing to obtain social justice are particularly inter- ested in theorizing and problematizing agency because it is implicated in any account of social change and transformation, or the lack thereof.

This essay starts by positioning agency in deceptively simple terms: as the capacity to act. In an influential 2005 essay, Campbell states that the word agency is “polysemic and ambiguous” (p. 1), rife with rich and often contra- dictory notions about the production of modernity and subjectivity, and the place of communication in the world. Agency is crucial for scholars con- cerned with social movement organizing for many reasons, but perhaps more than any other, the need to unpack the relationship between the communica- tive labor of social movements and broader social transformation. In other words, a central question for social movement organizing centers on the abil- ity to move. In this essay, I draw on Campbell’s fourfold formulation of com- municative agency as communal, participative, protean, and promiscuous, to animate and complicate definitions of agency and movement, focusing par- ticularly on the protean and promiscuous qualities of communicative agency

1Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

Corresponding Author: Shiv Ganesh, Massey University, Private Bag 102904, Auckland 0745, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]

586220MCQXXX10.1177/0893318915586220Management Communication QuarterlyGanesh research-article2015

482 Management Communication Quarterly 29(3)

to outline an eventful view of communicative agency. I unpack this further in the context of studies of social movement organizing.

The Capacity to Act

Against the modernist conception of the capacity to act as inhering in the autonomous individual subject, Campbell positions agency as communal and participative. As she notes, a slew of social theories tell us that agency is constituted by externals: it is produced and provided by overarching institu- tional orders and fields; by flexible and overlapping intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality; by the inscriptions and translations of actor-net- works; and by relations of hegemony, domination, and consent. Agency, then, clearly lies in the sphere of the social. It flows through and animates society and the world itself, and it is in that sense that we, collectively and commu- nally, participate in agency.

However, Campbell’s notion of agency is not only communal and partici- patory but it is also, she claims, promiscuous and protean. These latter quali- ties are hardly alluded to in her essay, but interestingly these are the very aspects of her work that have been taken up in organizational communication studies (e.g., see Ganesh & Stohl, 2013; Stohl & Ganesh, 2013). Jackson (2007), for example, sees communication itself as promiscuous, as creating random, uncontrolled, indiscriminate, and manifold connections between people and things. Campbell also implies that communication is protean, increasingly autonomous and decoupled from institutional constraints, but at the same time reinscribing relations of domination in peculiar new ways. Both these qualities help stretch organizational communication inquiry in new directions.

Understanding communicative agency in terms of promiscuity helps flesh out an event ontology, or an eventful view of the world. Agency is, after all, manifest through events, and the very idea of action invokes some concep- tion of what an event is, when it begins, and when it ends. Philosophical work on events is rich and varied, but a Deleuzian conception of events is particu- larly apt because it emphasizes becoming, the process through which mate- rial, ideational, and symbolic entities assemble, engage, transform, and co-constitute each other through time, constantly making and remaking orga- nizations; actualizing, deactualizing, territorializing, and deterritorializing (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). An eventful view of organizing is thus the key to positioning communicative agency as promiscuous and thereby mov- ing beyond dichotomies between the natural and the social, or between sub- jects and objects.

Ganesh 483

Understanding communicative agency as promiscuous and protean also helps consolidate, extend, even challenge issues around the transformation of communication into a commodity form under contemporary capitalism, in turn helping theorize possibilities for resistance. For some scholars, the pro- tean quality of contemporary communication, particularly digital communi- cation, renders communication politically ineffectual while reinforcing relations of domination. Dean (2005), for example, argues that the “prolifera- tion, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite—the post-political formation of communica- tive capitalism” (p. 53). In other words, the very fact that communication is protean and flows in an autonomous sphere means that it is now post-political and functions primarily as an economic form. As Dean states, “[C]ommuni- cative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production” (p. 56).

However, the political efficacy of protean and largely digital communica- tion flow in contemporary capitalism should be a matter of investigation, rather than assumption, for critical scholars, for several reasons. The very fact that communication is promiscuous, eventful, and is by definition unpredict- able, random, and chaotic means that its capacity to act is not predeter- minable, closed-off, or always and already apolitical. Moreover, the ability to organize politically in an era of digital ubiquity inverts several assumptions about the relationship between communication and collective action (see Ganesh & Stohl, 2013). In a post-Occupy era it is politically necessary to be more open ended and ambivalent about the ultimate potential of any kind of communication as a political activity in contemporary social movements. I elaborate this point below.

The Ability to Move

From an eventful point of view, the very idea of movement is agentic: It implies a capacity to change, transform, and impact. The question of the agency of movements is historically central to social movement studies, and has been expressly concerned with the vexed issue of movement outcomes (Tilly, 1999), or what social movements actually “do.” As scholars such as Tarrow (2005) have noted, most social movements that have revolutionary agendas often have, at the very least, some sort of reformative or accommo- dative impact. However, evaluating those outcomes is supremely difficult because their impact may not be immediately felt, or it may register in an altogether different social field.

484 Management Communication Quarterly 29(3)

Perhaps due to the difficulty of evaluating movement outcomes, social movement studies have often been preoccupied with understanding the mecha- nisms, processes, and identities of movements themselves, rather than with outcomes per se. In recent years, though, scholars like Bennett and Segerberg (2012) or Kolb (2007) have paid some attention to movement outcomes. An eventful view of social movements understands the communicative agency of movements in a dual sense. On the one hand, communication would be always and already communal, participative, promiscuous, and protean. Simultaneously, however, communicative agency is rendered historically contingent, as the pro- miscuous character of contemporary communication is something that is tech- nologically produced by a particular form of communicative capitalism. Two implications follow.

First, we need to examine social movement outcomes in much more com- plex and provisional ways, without dismissing them as entirely arbitrary. Different kinds of social movement outcomes are produced in the same event: instrumental, affective, and constitutive. While instrumental outcomes are those that are narrowly related to formal and material movement goals, affec- tive or expressive outcomes are those that are related to the emotional and consummatory aspects of social movement organizing—the title of Castells’ (2012) recent book on social movements, Networks of Outrage and Hope, illustrates this affective dimension well. Rhetoricians like Darrel Enck- Wanzer (2006) have also elaborated on what one might call the constitutive outcome of social movements, referring to the fact that social movements create entire social fields that are populated with particular subjects and iden- tities. Consider the post-Stonewall movement, for example, that crafted the mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community in the West.

Second, in the current era of digital ubiquity, post-global reflexivity, and the relentless instantaneousness of communication, we need to understand social movements as profoundly hybrid. Such hybridity is not only discur- sive-material in terms of the diversity of issues that are yoked together to form the “movement of movements” or the “network of networks” but also eventful in terms of the constant territorialization and reterritorialization of events themselves. Take, for instance, the activist group Sea Shepherd’s annual resistance against Japanese whaling expeditions to the Southern Seas, and the complex assembly of cultural practices, legal systems, maritime tech- nologies, discourses, digital networks, and activist bodies that results in our ability to track the small flotilla of vessels as they perilously follow the Nishin Maru for thousands of miles in cold and stormy waters. Where is that event taking place—in the Southern Ocean, off Antarctica, on the public screens of the Western world, or in the courtrooms of the International Court of Justice

Ganesh 485

in The Hague? From an eventful point of view, social movements are assem- bled in complex ways and movement events are no longer confined to single spaces; rather, they are constantly territorialized and reterritorialized across the globe.

Organizational communication scholars will have to apply multiple meth- odological skills to address such multi-nodal events. Rather than relying on traditional research designs that involve either qualitative or quantitative methods, we will need to develop more flexible approaches that combine ethnographic inquiry with survey methods, historical analysis, and visual analysis. The emerging field of cultural analytics (Manovich, 2013), for example, creatively combines the concerns of humanistic forms of inquiry with methods usually associated with big data analysis, to develop novel tools for visual and digital analysis. Turning to such new forms of analysis will not only add substance to current attempts to theorize agency and orga- nizing, but they will also enable a thorough understanding of the dynamics, complexity, and hybridity of social movements in the current era.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Boris Brummans for his thoughtful facilitation as editor of this forum, and Heather Zoller for her careful read of the manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This essay was made possible by a grant on collective action, social movement organizing, and technology from the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Foundation (MAU1209).

References

Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15, 739-768. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661

Campbell, K. K. (2005). Agency: Promiscuous and protean. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2, 1-19.

Castells, M. (2012). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the Internet age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Dean, J. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of poli- tics. Cultural Politics, 1, 51-74. doi:10.2752/174321905778054845

486 Management Communication Quarterly 29(3)

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Enck-Wanzer, D. (2006). Trashing the system: Social movement, intersectional rhet- oric, and collective agency in the Young Lords Organization’s garbage offensive. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92, 174-201. doi:10.2752/174321905778054845

Ganesh, S., & Stohl, C. (2013). From Wall Street to Wellington: Protests in an era of digital ubiquity. Communication Monographs, 80, 425-451. doi:10.1080/03637 751.2013.828156

Jackson, M. (2007). Fluidity, promiscuity, and mash-ups: New concepts for the study of mobility and communication. Communication Monographs, 74, 408-413. doi:10.1080/03637750701543543

Kolb, F. (2007). Protests and opportunities: The political outcomes of social move- ments. Chicago, IL: Campus Verlag.

Manovich, L. (2013, December 16). The algorithms of our lives. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Algorithms- of-Our-Lives-/143557/

Mumby, D. K. (1997). Modernism, postmodernism, and communication stud- ies: A rereading of an ongoing debate. Communication Theory, 7, 1-28. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.1997.tb00140.x

Stohl, C., & Ganesh, S. (2013). Generating globalization. In D. K. Mumby & L. L. Putnam (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication (3rd ed., pp. 717-741). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Tarrow, S. (2005). The new transnational activism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Tilly, C. (1999). From interactions to outcomes in social movements. In M. Giugni, D. McAdam, & C. Tilly (Eds.), How social movements matter (pp. 253-278). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Author Biography

Shiv Ganesh (PhD, Purdue University) is professor and head of the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing at Massey University in New Zealand. His research interests center on civil society organizing, globalization, and technology.