Home Alone and All Together: Lightness of agency in social inquiry

Abstract

Research has provided limited knowledge of how people in organizations experience growth of agency during circumstances that seem hopeless and stuck, and how such growth emerges. Drawing from the study of the turnaround processes at a nursing home and the Pragmatism of Dewey and Mead, we contribute with a theory of how agency is produced in social inquiry. We suggest that the puzzling accounts of lightness in the experiences of people at this nursing home help explain how a field of social inquiry may be charged with creative and agentic force. We show how agency emerged through a series of action sequences related to inviting people into inquiry through the opening of a troublesome situation, the resulting voicing of needs and ideas for improvement, as well as the subsequent experimenting and surfacing of tales of meaningful progress from such actions. Furthermore, our empirical observations suggest that the emergence of collective desire to meet the needs of the Generalized Other is a central, yet understated, part of agency produced through social inquiry. Lightness of agency may be accentuated, paradoxically, by the weight of a more generalized situation – in this case that of institutionalized care for elderly – that the local inquiry exemplifies and in which it resonates.