Agency, Desire, and Changing Organizational Routines

MacLean et al. (2015) and MacLean and MacIntosh (2012) critique both rational actor and normative theories of action – the latter rooted in sociological theorizing – arguing that neither approach adequately accounts for creativity within organizations. Although considerations of the normative model of agency are outside the scope of this paper, similar criticisms apply to this approach insofar as applications of the normative model of agency fail to account for endogenous change within organizations. For example, Nilsson (2015) argues that perspectives in institutional theory, typically employing a normative model of agency, have failed to adequately theorize the role of shared values or ideals in positively shaping organizational change. Accordingly, the philosophical account of agency introduced in this paper can be understood as extending both rational actor and normative models of agency by (a) explicitly distinguishing non-operationalized values or ideals from concrete objectives and (b) introducing a mechanism – dialectical activity – for explaining how such values shape agents’ concrete objective (Brewer 2011: 136), but in this paper, I focus on the way in which the analytical philosophy of action can enrich the rational actor model.

As Feldman (2000) explains, striving involves a reciprocal process whereby successfully achieved goals results in an improved understanding of ideals, which, in turn, result in the adoption of new concrete specified goals.

When discussing an additional housing organization routine, Feldman (2000: 621) notes that multiple mechanisms may be implicated in one instance of routine change. In the case she describes, the ideal in question is efficiency. Here efficiency is not treated as a measurable outcome but as an ideal that the organization ought to achieve in its activities. Feldman describes how the move-in routine (which was ‘successful’ according members’ expectations) led to an instance of striving where organization members came to understand that their initial conceptions of the ideal of efficiency were inadequate. After broadening their understanding of this ideal, new possibilities became apparent. According to Feldman, this is a situation where striving lead to an instance of the expanding mechanism. Important for the purpose of my argument is Feldman’s point that the striving mechanism always involves an expanded or improved understanding of an ideal.

In the discussion section, I consider the question of whether the account of action developed in this paper is applicable to for-profit, as opposed to public, organizations.

Davidson (1969 & 1978) distinguishes between prima-facie desires and all-things-considered desires, but this distinction does not account for the difference between operational and non-operational goals (March and Simon 1993).

Tsoukas (2005), following MacIntyre (2007), argues that social practices provide the context in which agents conceptualize the rational and historical continuity in their disparate experiences of acting. As I argue in greater detail below (Expanding the Davidsonian Theory of Agency section), social practices are the primary context in which agents reinterpret their objectives in the light of both their ideals and fellow practitioners’ reinterpretations, enabling them to distinguish between rational and arbitrary reinterpretations of ideals and objectives.

Sebastian Rödl (2007: 36) employs the term infinite end to identify this concept: “An end to which the contrast of pursuing and having got does not apply is an infinite end.” This distinction does not apply because infinite ends are never fully realized by a discrete set of actions.

Sebastian Rödl (2007: 36) calls such ideals, infinite ends, to capture their non-finite or indefinite character. Ideals such as health, justice, or beauty are never realized through a definite set of actions such that one is no longer able to strive to better achieve the ideal in question. Similarly, Candace Vogler (2009) argues that such ideals, which she terms befitting reasons for action, are time-general meaning that of their nature they are capable of being exemplified in an indefinite number of situations. This infinite or time-general characteristic of non-operational ideals underwrites Brewer’s (2011) claim that agents are continuously able to experience new aspects of the value or goodness of such ideals.

Feldman (2000: 621) identifies two instances of the striving mechanism. The first case, which I have described above, concerns situations where the intended outcome of an action is not obtained. The second case, involves situations where a successful action produces additional negative consequences about which the agent was unaware prior to the action. In both cases the repairing mechanism functions by changing the agents’ beliefs about the consequences of an action.

Harry Frankfurt (1988: 12) famously elaborated upon the concept of second-order desires as follows: “Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are.” Charles Taylor (1985b) explicitly links Frankfurt’s concept of second-order desire with the concept of an ideal or value. The fundamental idea behind the concept of a second-order desire is that human beings possess the capacity to adopt a disengaged stance toward any particular desire for an operational goal and, potentially, to desire either to maintain or change the particular first-order desire in question. See also Hartman (2013) for an application of this concept to business ethics.

“Practitioners discover and commit to goals that lie beyond their own selfish, short-term needs and desires. They realize that they can only achieve the internal goods that are of value to themselves, their social practice, and wider society when they emulate the standards of excellence already established within

the practice” (von Krogh et al. 2012: 660).