Agency and the anstoß max planck directors as fichtean subjects

Abstract

One of the core assumptions in agency theory has been that agency is a primordial at ribute of persons: an agent is 'the origin of causal events'. However, rather than situating agency at the origin, this article argues that we should at end to where agency, within a given context, itself originates. In Germany's Max Planck Society the departmental heads - so-called 'directors' - possess a signifi cant degree of 'agency' in realizing their personal will. Yet they are not its authors. On the contrary their agency is a secondary product of the philosophies of German Idealism, which eulogize the subjectivity of a heroic intellectual. In this analysis, the agency of the directors is not a precondition of their humanity, but the off spring of a specifi c cultural inheritance which frames the organization's intramural life. Organizational theorists should thus pay close at ention to the geo-cultural location of their object before drawing conclusions about agency. © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action.