Not just people (Greenbriar 3)

One of the arguments made about agency during the Greenbriar Inn dinner sponsored by Dale Hatfield was that organizational agency is just shorthand for the action of the group’s human members. This brief post summarizes my rebuttal of that claim.

When an organization responds (or doesn’t respond) to signals—including but not limited to normative pressures—from its environment or members, the question arises: is it really the organization acting, or just the people in it? This is an inherent problem for social analysis, since so many organizational actions are carried out by people. (Not just people, though: increasingly, software is acting directly without human intermediation or even supervision.) 

Here are some responses to the “it’s just people” argument:

• When different people in the organization, or different organizations in the same industry, respond in similar ways, the action is probably determined by the organization not the people. Examples include WaMu loan officers around the U.S. all writing similar predatory loans before the 2007 crisis; social media managers in many retail companies running Pride campaigns; various integrated health insurers creating pharmacy benefit management subsidiaries when the U.S. Congress capped insurer profits; and the increase in mainstream Hollywood funding and production of religious and faith-based movies in recent years.

• Many corporate actions are not performed by people, but rather by protocols and technologies. People are certainly involved in their development and deployment of processes and tools. However, establishing a direct causal link is hard, especially if (a) the non-human processes are of long standing; (b) their origins are opaque and intertwined, like tax rules; or (c) not even humans know why the algorithms do what they’re doing, as in content recommendation systems and LLMs.

• Even when people are the actors, I would submit that they are often acting as the mere agents of the organization. They are not independent and autonomous agents but are acting on behalf of their principal, such as their employer.

Other posts in this series

• "Evil" Corporations (Greenbriar 1)
• Ogregores and Agency (Greenbriar 2)