Agency at Work: A Dynamic Interpretive Approach

doi:10.4236/sm.2012.24047

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Sociology Mind

2012. Vol.2, No.4, 355-361

Published Online October 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/sm) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sm.2012.24047

Agency at Work: A Dynamic Interpretive Approach

to the Study of Action

Colin Campbell

Department of Sociology, Un iversity of York, York, UK

Email: [email protected]

Received July 16th, 2012; r evised August 19th, 2012; acc e p t e d A u gust 29th, 2012

Roy’s 1950s paper “Banana Time” is used as the basis for an exploration of the nature and relationship of

agency and action. Roy’s activity in playing his “game of work” is shown to be a feature of individual

conduct that, despite possessing subjective meaning, is largely neglected by contemporary sociologists,

mainly because of its covert character. What an examination of this aspect of his conduct suggests is the

need to revise the conventional observational approach to the definition of the unit act by recognising that

there may well be an additional actor’s covert definition sitting within the accepted social definition and

that it is therefore necessary to use the criterion of attentionality to identify the unit act. An analysis of

Roy’s game of work also helps to shed light on the possible relationship between action and agency, re-

vealing that while the power of agency enables individuals to act, it is also frequently necessary for indi-

viduals to act in order to maintain or restore their power of agency. Finally, a consideration of the func-

tion fulfilled by Roy’s game of work shows that a behaviourist-style stimulus-response analysis of con-

duct is not at odds either with voluntarism or the adoption of the actor’s standpoint. This is because Roy

demonstrates how actors are themselves lay behaviourists, fully aware of how they need to manipulate

stimuli in order to produce desired responses in themselves.

Keywords: Agency; Definition of Action; Covert Action; Dynamic Interpretivism

Introduction

In 1959 David Roy published an article in the journal Human

Organization entitled “Banana Time”: Job Satisfaction and

Informal Interaction” that has subsequently come to acquire the

status of a classic in the field of industrial sociology (Roy,

1959). Although the focus of the article was on the social and

interactive functions performed by a ritual enacted by a group

of workers (this features the contents of a lunch box, hence the

significance of the title) it also includes an intriguing account of

how Roy, who enrolled as a worker in order to conduct his

research through participatory observation, struggled to adapt to

the manual role allotted to him. The job in question was that of

a clicker and involved operating a machine that used steel dies

to punch out pieces of leather or plastic. The work was ex-

tremely simple and very repetitive with the result that the te-

dium of the twelve-hour job quickly led Roy to experience “the

beast of monotony”, leading to boredom and fatigue1. These

feelings were so acute that he considered abandoning the job

and with it his projected programme of research. That he didn’t

in the end do so was because he discovered a way of coping

with the intrinsic boredom of the task allotted to him by turning

his actions into what he called his game of work. This involved

alternating the colours of the items worked together with

cleaning the die-head of the machine according to a set of rules

that he invented. The effect of this was to invest the extremely

simple movements that constituted the task in hand with a dis-

tinct meaning thereby providing for himself a system of re-

wards (albeit, as he admits, fairly minimal) linked to the

mini-goals so created. Roy himself describes the game of work

he created in this way as serving to create a “sequence of

short-range production goals with achievement rewards in the

form of activity change” (1959: p. 161). The effect of this was

that instead of being confronted by a seemingly endless series

of undifferentiated “happenings” Roy managed to create mean-

ingful experiences for himself, and in this way he found that he

could sustain an activity which previously he had experienced

as so excruciatingly boring, and consequently tiring, that he had

contemplated handing in his notice and abandoning the research.

This account of Roy’s experiences while undertaking research

would appear at first glance to have no particular significance

for sociology, except perhaps to serve as a warning of the dif-

ficulties that can be encountered when engaged in participatory

observation. It is certainly not immediately obvious how a con-

sideration of his experience might lead to significant insights

into the nature of action and agency let alone the development

of a novel perspective for their study. However these are pre-

cisely the claims that will be advanced here.

Action at Work

1Roy described his work situation as “standing all day in one spot beside

three old codgers in a dingy room looking out through barred windows at

the bare walls of a brick warehouse, leg movements restricted to the shifting

of body weight from one foot to the other, hand and arm movements con-

fined, for the most part, to a simple repetitive sequence of place the die,

punch the clicker, place the die, punch the clicker, and intellectual activity

reduced to c o mputing t h e hours to quitting time” (1959: p. 160).

The first point of note about the events described by Roy is

that they would not normally be recognised as constituting a

phenomenon worthy of sociological investigation. Since his

game of work is not part of an on-going social interaction, ori-

ented towards others or indeed visible to others, it would not

count as social action as this term is generally understood. But

C. CAMPBELL

then it is also unlikely to be recognised as action by those per-

spectives, currently popular in the discipline, that do focus on

individual, non-interactive conduct, such as rational choice or

rational action theory. For characteristically these perspectives

only employ abstract models of human behaviour, taking little

interest in the real subjective experience of actors, whilst also

focusing exclusively on decision-taking. Hence, while such

perspectives might be applied to an understanding of why Roy

decided to take the job of clipper in the first place (and possibly

even, had he been forced to abandon it, why he had done so),

how he managed to handle the strains and stresses of the job

itself would not be subject to investigation2.

Yet there would seem to be no good reason for excluding

what Roy recounts doing in his game of work from the subject

matter of the discipline. For it does fall into the category of

action as traditionally defined and understood. That is to say it

meets Weber’s requirement of being “human behaviour to

which the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning”

(1964: p. 88), while the fact that his behaviour is solitary in

nature and neither oriented to others or observed by them would

not appear to be a problem given that Weber’s most famous

example of action—that of the woodcutter chopping wood—is

also an instance of an individual acting alone and presumably

unobserved. Furthermore the fact that the conduct he describes

was apparently covert, or at least not actually noticeable to

others, would also not seem to be a problem given that, as We-

ber also asserts, action may be “either overt or purely inward or

subjective” (1964: p. 88). One is thus left to wonder why, in

this case, the kind of experience Roy recounts is typically not

the subject of sociological attention. But then, despite Weber’s

remark, it is actually the case that almost none of the theoretical

traditions that flourish in contemporary sociology concern

themselves with covert conduct, focusing exclusively on that

portion of an individual’s behaviour which is overt and hence

observable to others3. To what extent sociologists should be

censored for this omission is debatable given that Weber him-

self appears to overlook the significance of his own observation

when illustrating his interpretive method as he fails to provide

any real examples of covert actions; that is ones resembling that

provided by Roy4, apparently making the mistake of assuming

that the concept covered no more than the deliberate absence of

overt action5.

But then what is especially interesting about the behaviour

Roy describes is that it is neither a simple example of overt or

of covert action but rather a combination of the two, and hence

it is a surprise to realise that Weber seems to have made the

assumption—in which he was followed by Schutz (1967)

among others - that all actions could be divided into the two

simple categories of overt and covert rather than considering

the very real possibility that they might be a combination of the

two. Now although Roy does not make it clear in his account to

what extent it would be apparent to the casual observer that his

actions as a clicker-operator followed his own distinctly pat-

terned sequence, he does observe that he subsequently discov-

ered that many of his fellow-workers employed similar strate-

gies to his own game of work, something that he would pre-

sumably have discovered on his first day had this been an easily

observable feature of their conduct. So here we have an exam-

ple of a genuine action (or sequence of actions) which are

partly overt in so far as Roy’s fellow-workers, not to mention

his supervisor, can clearly see that he is operating a clicker

machine, whilst also being partly covert in the form of his game

of work, a combination that presents special difficulties as long

as one sticks to the conventional sociological approach to the

identification of action6.

Identifying Action

A long-standing and stubborn problem at the heart of action

theory has been that of how to successfully identify the unit act

and in identifying it describe it correctly. Weber himself as-

sumed that this could be achieved by a process of “direct ob-

servational understanding” (1964: p. 95) an assumption that is

still prevalent in sociology today. And yet, as Schutz has ob-

served, only the actor is really in a position to give an accurate

description of what he or she could be said to be “doing” (1973:

p. 22). Certainly if we applied Weber’s famous formula to

Roy’s conduct we would be forced to conclude that he was

“operating a clicker machine” much as Weber confidently de-

clared that the woodcutter was “chopping wood” (an assertion

that has a suspiciously tautological ring to it). But we know

from Roy himself that this is an inadequate or at least incom-

plete description of what he was doing. Where therefore a con-

sideration of Roy’s experience appears to lead is to a reconsid-

eration of the difficult problem of how to successfully identify

and describe action. Clearly the danger with the conventional

approach is the error of assuming that an individual’s action

consists of merely that portion which is overt and observable.

But of course not only may this not be equivalent to all that an

individual is “doing” it may not even be the portion that con-

tains “subjective meaning”, being performed habitually, as is

currently the case for example with my typing of this article;

for it is the covert portion—my thinking about what it is that I

am typing—that represents the section of my conduct that

really does possess “subjective meaning”. As long therefore as

sociologists consider it important to study action, as opposed

that is to mere behaviour, there will always be a crucial issue

that needs to be decided: notably, which portion of an individ-

2In principal phenomenological sociology, given its derivation from a phi-

losophical tradition that focused on the description of experiences, ought to

e a theor eti cal p ers pect iv e th at co ul d in deed reg ard Ro y’s g ame o f wo rk as

a phenomenon worthy of study. In reality however this strand of theorising,

as it has influenced sociology, has tended to focus on shared knowledge and

experience (see Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

3The decision-making that comprises the basic subject matter of rational

action theory could be said to be largely covert in character since it pre-

sumably consists of mental processes. However, as noted, this theoretical

perspective does not study real phenomena as such choosing to work with

models of human action.

4As suggested below Weber could be said to supply real examples of covert

action in what might be called his applied work, such as The Protestan

thic and Spirit of Capitalism, even if he doesn’t do this in his brief meth-

odological statement.

5Schutz also observes that action may be covert and he gives the example o

someone attempting to solve a scientific problem mentally. However he

seemsto forget about this example in his subsequent discussion where he

follows Weber’s lead in assuming that covert action equals inaction (1973:

p. xxxiv an d 20).

6In fact most true actions are likely to be partly covert in the manner o

Roy’s game. That is to say some crucial part of the action is likely to be

occurring intra-subjectively in the form of cognitions, feelings or imagin-

ings that are not apparent to an observer. One of the examples that Weber

gives to illustrate understanding an action in terms of motive illustrates this

oint. He writes that we can understand the action of an individual “w r it[ing

down the proposition twice two equals four” in the course of “balancing a

ledger” (1964: p. 95). But of course only part of the relevant action here is

overt: the actual writing in the ledger. The calculation itself is covert, since

it occurs in the accountant’s mind, not on the paper in front of him.

356

C. CAMPBELL

ual’s conduct it is that is actually possessed of subjective

meaning.

But then this does raise the question of quite how the term

“subjective meaning” itself should be interpreted given its key

role in serving to distinguish action from behaviour. Conven-

tionally this is understood to refer to the intentions (or possibly

goals or motives) that are presumed to be manifest in the action

in question, and indeed it is usually the nature of the intention

that serves to define the action, as in the claim that the wood-

cutter’s action consists of “chopping wood”. However, when

we turn to consider Roy’s activity we see that there are over-

lapping intentions underlying his conduct. His initial decision

to take the job of a clipper was because of his intention to en-

gage in participatory observation. On the other hand his game

of work was undertaken with the intention of combating bore-

dom and fatigue, while looking even more closely at his be-

haviour one could say that any one discrete action Roy per-

forms is undertaken with the intention of completing the current

game. Clearly one crucial difficulty with using intentionality as

the principal means of defining action is that it is unclear where

precisely the parameters should be drawn, given that conduct

commonly embodies a variety of what might be considered

overlapping intentions, with the consequence that it becomes

difficult to know precisely how the action should be defined.

Put succinctly one can say that a single act many embody many

intentions, just as a single intention may guide many different

actions. Hence in this case one could describe Roy’s actions as

a) playing the game of work; b) working as a clicker; c) under-

taking participant observation7.

Yet a consideration of Roy’s case can help resolve the prob-

lem of discriminating between multiple intentions. For although

Roy is clearly doing (or performing) the job of a clicker, some-

thing he has undertaken in order to be in a position to engage in

participatory observation, it would be more accurate to say that

he is “playing his game of work” for that is what he is actually

attending to. Hence attentionality can provide the key to dis-

criminating between intentions and therefore between alterna-

tive descriptions of action. What is more, employing attention-

ality in this way has the considerable advantage of facilitating

the process of distinguishing between action—viewed as con-

taining subjective meaning in the sense of being “meaningfully

oriented” (Weber, 1964: p. 116)—from habitual conduct. For

while these cannot be distinguished in terms of intentionality

(most habitual conduct manifests intention), they can be dis-

tinguished in terms of attentionality, since to attend to some

aspect of one’s conduct (that is to perform it “attentively”) is by

definition to imbue it with meaning, while to act inattentively is

to act “without giving any thought to what one is doing”. At the

same time attention is a faculty that is limited by definition (it

is difficult to “attend to” more than one thing at a time), whilst

there are no limits to the number of intentions that can be sub-

sumed by any action or programme of actions. Consequently

what Roy’s example shows is that, succinctly expressed, we

can say that what someone is “doing” at any one time is what

they are “attending to”8. This does not mean of course that the

actor is unaware of the other intentions that are also guiding, or

perhaps one should say framing, the action in question. Hence a

more precise definition of action would also include these. Thus,

in Roy’s case we could say that his action consisted of “playing

the game of work so that he could continue to perform the role

of working as a clicker”; or even “playing the game of work so

that he could continue to perform the role of working as a

clicker in order that he could carry out his research”; this par-

ticular nesting formulation of the nature of action being a more

truthful manner of describing the conduct of actors than the

more conventional, single-intention style definitions.

Essentially the problem of defining and delineating action

comes down to the issue of how the continuing flow of human

conduct is to be broken up into meaningful units, and there

would seem to be only two feasible ways of doing this. The

one—which currently dominates in the discipline—is to rely on

situational or conventional institutional guidance in order to

identify actions, and it is by employing this approach that it is

possible to identify given classes of actions, such as greetings

for example, or specific tasks, such as Roy’s “working as a

clicker”. But the drawback with this approach is that it may not

correspond to that which possesses subjective meaning for the

actor concerned. This is not to say that the actor does not rec-

ognise that her activity has this meaning (that is to say has a

conventional or socially agreed name or denotation), but that,

when viewed from the actor’s perspective, it lacks “meaning-

fulness”. And the only way to ensure that conduct is divided up

in a manner that accounts for this dimension is to employ the

criterion of attention. It is however important to note that such a

position implies recognition of the fact that which sections of

an actor’s conduct can be judged to constitute action and which

behaviour (setting aside involuntary respondent behaviours)

may change over time as attention is switched between differ-

ent aspects of an actor’s overall “doings” 9.

Agency at Work

Having noted how Roy’s conduct poses questions for the

conventional approach to defining action it is time to observe

that his game of work is actually more intimately related to the

issue of agency than action per se. Or at least it is to that par-

ticular conception of agency that defines it as “the capacity for

willed (voluntary) action” (Marshall, 1994: p. 7) or “the so-

cioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001: p. 112)

or what Campbell (2009) refers to as type 1 agency. For one of

the most interesting features of Roy’s game of work is the rea-

son why he invented it in the first place, which was in order to

maintain his power of agency; that is to say, his ability to initi-

ate and carry through a course of action. This observation

points to a crucial feature of human conduct that sociologists

rarely acknowledge: the fact that action can fail. This basic fact

of life is ignored by virtually all forms of action theory, with

the actor’s ability to perform actions treated as a taken-for-

granted premise; for, as Stephen Fuchs notes, “theorists assume

that persons ‘have agency’” (2001: p. 27). So it is important to

remember that actors routinely embark on programmes of ac-

tion—as Roy did when he signed on as a clicker—only to find

7Schutz makes this point arguing that Weber grossly oversimplified the task

of eliciting the intended meaning of an act given that this changes over time.

“One cannot... speak simply of the intended meaning attached to an action...

to become fully meaningful, it requires a date index specifying the moment

of the meaning-interpretation” (1967: p. 65).

8It may be of course that an individual is not “acting” at all. That is to say

they may not be ‘attending to’ anything (for example if they are day-

dreaming or simply on auto-

ilot), even though they can still be seen to be

“behaving”.

9It is also impor tant to reali ze that which sectio ns of an indiv idual ’s con duct

constitute action and which behaviour also change over time biographically,

processes normally referred to under such headings as “learning” or “ha-

bituation”.

C. CAMPBELL

that they are struggling to carry them out, given that there are

inherent inescapable limits to any actor’s power of agency

(Campbell, 2011). To that extent action is necessarily a contin-

gent phenomenon, dependent for its accomplishment on the

presence of prerequisites, the nature of which need to be exam-

ined. It is an interesting observation on the state of contempo-

rary sociology that the ability of individuals to interact suc-

cessfully is not take-for-granted but subject to a detailed an

extensive programme of research; so why, one wonders, is their

ability to ac t not subje ct to a similar programme?

Roy recognised after only a short period in his new job that

he might have to abandon it because boredom and fatigue were

sapping his will to carry on. Had he done so this would have

amounted to a failure of agency. He therefore took steps to

maintain, or repair, this faculty by inventing the game of work.

This, as he said, had the effect of imbuing his actions with

meaning, or perhaps more accurately with meaningfulness since

they already had a formal meaning in the sense of being a link

in the chain of actions that resulted in the creation of a manu-

factured product. What turning them into a game achieved was

to relate them directly to his own system of needs, providing

some personal satisfaction and hence the motivation to continue

with his allotted task. What is of special interest about this ex-

ample is that it illustrates the manner in which actors can use

their ability to manipulate meaning to control their behaviour.

As we can see in this instance the degree of freedom that indi-

viduals possess to use their meaning-manipulating skills to

define their immediate environment is not necessarily at odds

with the more formal social definitions of situations with which

sociologists are familiar. In that respect Roy was not defining

his situation differently from the way in which others defined it:

he was still working as a clicker. He had merely constructed a

purely personal action-related definition of his situation, one

that could as it were sit inside his formal social situation. It is

also important to note, in view of the prevailing tendency in

sociology to judge all cultural phenomena to be not merely

social but shared, that Roy’s game was his own invention, and

although no doubt he applied some highly general ideas about

the nature of games in order to construct it, it still remained his

game, one entirely invented by him.

This example is also revealing when considered from the

perspective of the other interpretation given to the concept of

agency, that which stresses its meaning as the “capacity of in-

dividuals to act independently of structural constraints” (Aber-

crombie et al., 1984: p. 6) or “independently of the determining

constraints of social structure” (Jary & Jary, 1991: p. 10).

Roy’s conduct as a clipper was clearly `constrained’ by social

structure in the form of the occupational role he occupied, set as

it was within the formal institutional context of a factory work-

place. And yet he managed to innovate in this context all the

same, not merely renegotiating the meaning of the activity that

he was required to undertake but actually re-arranging the order

in which its individual actions were performed. In other words

Roy succeeded in creating a space for himself, one in which he

could be creative and express something of his personality,

within the context of the highly structured role that he had no

choice but to act out. No choice that is once he had committed

himself to it. For of course the constraint that Roy experienced

in this connection was self-imposed, having entered into it vol-

untarily. He was not, as some of his fellow workers may have

been, effectively forced to work as a clipper in a factory by the

need to earn a living. However, having made the decision to

adopt this role, his freedom to act was then powerfully con-

strained. In other words it was as a consequence of the manner

in which he exercised his power of choice in the past that he

subsequently experienced considerable constraint on his free-

dom to act in the present. This is a significant observation be-

cause it shows how agency is an essentially self-limiting faculty

and that actors will always experience some constraint on their

freedom as a direct consequence of their very exercise of that

freedom. Indeed what Roy’s experience in this respect demon-

strates is the need for an adequate theory of action to go beyond

simply focusing on how individuals exercise their ability to

make choices, together with their reasons and motives for doing

so, to include how they manage to accomplish actions once

they have embarked on them. For it could be argued that for

many people the central problem they face in their lives is less

what choices to make than how to successfully accomplish

those programmes of action to which they are already commit-

ted.

Agency in Action

The above discussion helps to shed light on what has long

been recognised as something of a problem in sociology theory,

namely the relationship between agency and action. If we use

Roy’s experience as a guide we can say that while it is neces-

sary to possess the power of agency in order to be able to un-

dertake actions it is also sometimes necessary for an individual

to undertake actions with the express purpose of maintaining or

restoring the power of agency. What is distinctive about this

particular class of actions, which for convenience we might call

agency management or control actions, is that they tend to take

the form of creating goals or outcomes that in turn help to sup-

ply the motivation necessary to initiate or complete a pro-

gramme of action, and as such the normal process of explana-

tion is reversed. For conventionally one explains an action by

seeking the goal (or sometimes the motive) that underlies it, as

Weber does when he says that “we understand the chopping of

wood… if we know that the woodchopper is working for a wage

or chopping a supply of firewood for his own use” (1964: p. 95).

But understanding agency management actions requires that

one explains the goals actors have selected in terms of the ac-

tion that they serve to maintain, as for example when Roy says

that he “created a sequence of short-range production goals”

(1959: p. 161) for himself by inventing his game of work. In

other words agency management actions all have the same goal,

which is to maintain or increase the power of agency. Hence in

these cases one explains goals in terms of actions rather than

vice versa.

But then understanding agency management or control ac-

tions also requires that one abandons the logical or cognitive

bias that for so long has dominated the investigation of mean-

ing in action theory. Traditionally sociologists have interpreted

Weber’s recommendation that one should understand actions

by placing them in a more inclusive context of meaning as im-

plying that they should be considered as if they were connected

rationally, principally in a means-end manner, as in the quote

given above concerning the woodcutter’s actions. Yet in order

to make sense of Roy’s invention of the game of work contex-

tual understanding requires the application not of a means-end

framework but of a dynamic or behavioural one; specifically an

appreciation of the role that actions can have as stimuli that

produce a gratifying response. Indeed it is important to note

358

C. CAMPBELL

that there is no logical connection between Roy’s game and his

activity as a clicker (in the way that it is sometimes claimed that

beliefs and values are logically connected with actions). The

connection is a dynamic or behavioural one in which Roy’s

game has to be seen not as a means to an end but rather as an

end in itself. That is to say as an autotelic activity, one per-

formed for the intrinsic satisfaction it provides. Unfortunately

the application of such a behavioural model has, from the very

beginnings of action theory, been seen as at odds with both

voluntarism and the adoption of the actor’s frame of reference.

And indeed Weber himself refers to understanding action that is

a response to a stimulus as “affectually determined and thus in

a certain sense irrational” (1964: p. 95, italics added). Yet it is

clear from Roy’s example that this is not necessarily the case,

as in this instance a behavioural perspective is included in the

subjective standpoint employed by the actor. Consequently in

understanding the action in question as constituting a stimu-

lus-response pattern one is not stepping outside the actor’s

frame of reference. This is because Roy reveals himself to be

something of a lay behaviourist, knowing full well what kind of

stimuli he needed to invent in order to produce the desired re-

sponse in himself. Indeed it was because Roy understood how

his behaviour was controlled by stimuli that he was able to

exercise voluntary control over his actions. It follows from this

example that sociologists are wrong to assume that a behav-

iourist-style analysis is at odds with an interpretivist and vol-

untaristic approach to the study of action. The reason they are

not incompatible is because human beings are different from

animals. For one thing they can use knowledge and foresight to

re-arrange their environment so as to adjust the stimuli to which

they are exposed. But then crucially humans do not so much

respond to stimuli as respond to their meanings and because

individuals have some control over these meanings it is possi-

ble for them to use this control to influence their responses, as

Roy did in this case. The movements that he was required to

undertake in order to fulfil his role as a clipper are the stimuli in

question, together with the objects themselves—principally the

pieces of plastic—that he was required to manipulate. By using

his own capacity to create meaning to impose a pattern on these

movements as well as inventing a set sequence in which the

plastic pieces were processed Roy managed to change the na-

ture of these stimuli and hence his own response to the activity.

So we can see that Roy’s actions in inventing the game of work

followed first from his monitoring of his own behaviour, and

his clear recognition of the various behavioural cues that indi-

cated fatigue and boredom on his part, and then second, from

his understanding of the nature of the stimuli he needed to cre-

ate in order to alter his own behavioural condition in a manner

that would produce a re-energised state.

It can be seen from this that there is no contradiction between

an interpretive analysis of the meaning of an actor’s conduct

and a behavioural analysis in terms of cause and effect. To

suggest, a some sociologists have done, that sociology should

be concerned with “understanding action rather than observing

behaviour” (Silverman, 1970: p. 126) is to fail to recognise that

actors are observers of their own behaviour and, as lay behav-

iourists, endeavour to control their environment, and hence the

stimuli to which they are exposed, in order to control them-

selves. It is also to overlook the fact that while it may be true to

suggest that a full-blooded behavioural perspective has no room

for an interpretive analysis of meaning the reverse is not the

case, if only because action is actually a form of behaviour10.

But then given that what individuals do has always comprised

not simply a combination of action and behaviour but an inte-

grated pattern of conduct in which these two forms are inti-

mately interlinked it was always mistaken to imagine that one

could successfully be examined without reference to the other.

The value of a dynamic interpretive approach to the study of

human action therefore is that it involves recognising that ac-

tors regularly manipulate both stimuli and their meanings in

order to control their conduct.

Objections

There are two possible objections that might be raised

against the suggestion that a consideration of Roy’s account of

his experience as a clipper could form the basis for a revised

approach to the study of action and agency. One is that the

activity that he describes engaging in is relatively rare and

hence not significant enough to warrant its use as a justification

for a novel theoretical perspective, while the second is that the

phenomenon concerned, although of interest, really belongs to

the discipline of psychology rather than sociology. However, a

little reflection reveals that neither of these really has much

force. In the first place it is clear that Roy’s experience was not

in any way unique. Indeed as he notes he subsequently discov-

ered th at many of h is fellow workers h ad devise d simila r, if not

necessarily identical, strategies to his own game of work in

order that they too might be able to perform their allotted roles

successfully, suggesting that the phenomenon in question is not

isolated or unusual but on the contrary commonplace. That is to

say this form of behaviour is something that people have in

common even if it is not something that they could necessarily

be said to share. Indeed it would seem highly probable that

agency control actions of this kind occur whenever and wher-

ever individuals find that their ability to successfully initiate or

accomplish actions is in doubt11. Then of course there is the

interesting question of the cultural resources available for actors

to draw upon in order to re-define or re-negotiate both the

meaning of their own actions and the stimuli they encounter in

their environment. Where this material comes from and how it

is employed in the processes of action accomplishment is

clearly a matter of some interest to sociologists. But then what

also suggests that this should not be regarded as by any means a

purely psychological phenomenon is the fact that actors do not

simply use their ability to manipulate meaning in order to ac-

complish action in small-scale or short-lived sequences of ac-

tion. For the manipulation of meaning in order to sustain

agency and hence the accomplishment of programmes of action

can occur at any level, from the briefest of actions up to a com-

plete programme for life. Weber himself supplies examples of

the latter in the course of his discussion of the problems that

Calvinists faced in their determination to stick to their excep-

tionally demanding regime of ascetic self-control. These efforts

were, as he suggests, consistently undermined by doubts about

10To contrast action with behaviour is not to imply the necessity of employ-

ing contrasting descriptive schemes or paradigms (let alone incompati

epistemologies and methodologies); it is merely to refer to empirically

differentiated forms of c onduct.

11This is not to say that such individualistic and covert or co-overt actions

are the on l y mean s of co mb at i n g threats to agency. In d eed the main t h rust o

Roy’s article is his account of how his fellow-workers combated their ex-

eriences of boredom and monotony by developing their own interactive

“games”. Th es e were no t h o wever, as he notes, in p l ace of co v er t d ef i ni t io ns

like his game of work but rather in addition to them.

C. CAMPBELL

their status as members of the elect. In other words their ability

to act was threatened, not by boredom and fatigue as in Roy’s

case, but by paralyzing panic, despair and “the anxious fear of

death” (Weber, 1965: p. 107). Consequently they were advised

to view any doubts they experienced as the work of the devil

and exhorted to consider themselves saved in order to generate

the self-confidence necessary to cope with the “daily struggle

of life” (ibid, 111). In other words, just like Roy, they worked

to impose a definition upon the situation in which they found

themselves that served the function of maintaining their power

of agency. All of which suggests that in arguing for the need to

study essentially intra-subjective or covert processes, the most

that could be claimed is that one is recognizing sociology’s

necessary dependence on psychology rather than actually re-

ducing the former to the latter.

Methodological Significance

One final observation worth noting is that a dynamic inter-

pretive approach to the study of action carries with it a clear

implication concerning the appropriate method for studying

action, one that counters the skepticism that has so often been

expressed concerning the accuracy of actors’ reports of their

conduct, a skepticism that has led some sociologists to claim

that self-reports can tell us little or nothing about the events

they purport to describe (Mills, 1940; Semin & Manstead, 1983;

and Gilbert & Abell, 1983). But then, in line with the argument

advanced above, there is bound to be a disjunction between

people’s actions and their reports of them if anything other than

the actors’ own descriptions are employed for the purposes of

identifying what counts as their actions. The particular advan-

tage of a dynamic interpretive approach that employs an atten-

tional criterion for identifying action is that this means there are

excellent reasons for believing that actors are able to give full

and accurate descriptions of what they are doing. The reason

for this confidence is that people generally know what it is that

they have been attending to or consciously doing. Whilst they

may well find difficulty in reporting some aspects of their be-

haviour and perhaps in some instances also find it difficult to

specify exactly what their intentions, motives or purposes might

have been, they will always know what has been the focus of

their consciousness. For as White says, “to ask a person what

he (sic) is doing now is usually to ask what is at present occu-

pying his (sic) whole energies, that is what he (sic) is con-

sciously doing. It is, therefore, a question which he (sic) can

immediately answer” (1964: p. 70)12. Individuals will, for the

same reason, find it relatively easy to report on past actions,

provided that is they are not too far in the past. This is because

there is ample evidence to suggest that people remember what

they attend to whilst correspondingly forgetting that which they

never attended to properly in the first place. This is a maxim

that applies to one’s own conduct just as much as to events in

the external environment. Thus it is, once again, that by defini-

tion, actors should have little difficulty recovering details about

their former actions whilst being unable to report very much

about their previous behaviour13. It follows from this that

studying action requires the investigator to always ask respon-

dents what it is that they are or have been attending to, or con-

centrating on, and never prejudge the nature of their actions by

naming them in the questioning process itself. They can then be

confident not only of the respondent’s ability to answer but also

that the answer will itself be a true description of the action in

question.

Conclusion

One sociologist’s personal account of the way in which he

resolved a difficulty encountered in the process of undertaking

research has been taken as the material for a reexamination of

the way in which both action and agency are conventionally

conceptualized within sociology. Although not normally in-

cluded in the subject-matter of the discipline it is argued that

personal covert, semi-covert (or co-overt) activities, such as

Roy’s game of work, represent a vital dimension of all actions

or programmes of action; indeed that they frequently constitute

the essence of subjective meaning and hence not only that their

study should be included in any genuine theory of action but

that their significance for the successful accomplishment of

what are conventionally identified as social actions needs to be

acknowledged. However it is argued that it is necessary to rec-

ognize, if this crucial phenomenon is to be the subject of socio-

logical analysis, that action can only be adequately identified

and defined by the actor and consequently should be equated

with that portion of an actor’s conduct to which he or she is

paying attention, the employment of an attentional criterion

helping to resolve many of the ambiguities that are inherent in

the use of intentionality alone. Approaching the study of action

in this way also helps to shed light on the manner in which

agency and action are interrelated, focusing attention on the

way in which actions help to maintain agency as well as agency

actions, the distinctive category of agency control actions being

the fact that goals are explicable in terms of the actions they

serve to maintain rather than vice versa. This then in turn points

to the necessity, if the manner in which action is accomplished

is to be fully understood, of applying a dynamic behavioural

analysis, one that focuses on stimuli and their responses—to-

gether with motivational structures in general—rather than

simply the eliciting of meaning. However this does not imply

any rejection of the actor’s perspective, let alone any abandon-

ment of the assumption of voluntarism, given that the nature of

this dynamic understanding is derived directly from the actor’s

own account.

Weber described sociology as a science that “attempts the

interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to

arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.” (1964:

p. 88), yet sadly the history of the discipline suggests that this

prescription has not been followed with “interpretive under-

standing” and “causal explanation” effectively going their

separate ways. The consequence of this division has been that

the ability to act voluntarily has been equated with the freedom

to make choices or construct meaning and hence with thought

and reasoning, whilst emotion, effort and imagination have

been allotted little or no role in this process, being seen as pri-

marily associated with deterministic assumptions about the

nature of human conduct. Yet as the example of Roy’s game of

work clearly shows the ability of individuals to act is just as

dependent on the capacity to emote and to imagine as it is upon

12This is still true even if an individual has not been acting at all, as they

should have little difficulty in reporting this fact, via some formula such as,

“Oh, I wasn’t doing anything, I was just day-dreaming.”

13As Stendhal observed, “

t is very difficult to describe from memory wha

was natural in your behaviour; it is easier to e voke what was art ificial o

affected s ince the effo rt needed to put on an act also engraves it in mem-

ory.” (Elster 1983: p. 52. Italics in original).

360

C. CAMPBELL

the ability to reason; a mistake that sociologists would not have

made had they concentrated on studying action-making instead

of decision-making or meaning-making. That is to say if they

had taken the actor’s definition of the situation rather than the

conventional social definition as their starting point and con-

centrated on studying the “meaningfulness” rather than simply

“the meaning” of action. A dynamic interpretive approach to

the study of action aims to redress these deficiencies by seeking

to understand action not by placing it in a larger framework of

meanings, but rather through an examination of its constituent

elements, and hence to shed light on how precisely individuals

really do ma na ge to act.

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