It’s important to understand the nature of organizational agency in order to reckon with the scale and complexity of the institutions shaping public, private, and planetary futures. My thinking has evolved since writing Defining Agency in 2022. It’s time for an update.
When a tiger takes a small child, people usually don't consider it to be an evil being. It's doing what tigers do. Animals are not moral agents; only people are. By the same token, while organizations may have agency, they are not moral agents. It’s an error to think of them as good or evil. (For a contrary view asserting that artificial agents, primarily computer systems but also organizations, can be moral agents in some sense, see Floridi & Sanders, 2004.) (References at the end.)
I’ve invented a pantheon that represents collective social agents, i.e., ogregores—the “ogregods.”
