Agents in Crisis: Theoretical Studies on Agency, Meaning and Time

The concept of crisis has become a staple in describing the current state of the social world. In the last decades, sociological theorists have retrieved the notion in connection with its cognate idea of critique. This retrieval comes hand in hand with recognising a dual character of crisis situations. On the one hand, crises are produced by causal dynamics and mechanisms, which a naturalistic approach to social structures can account for. On the other hand, crises are made sense and transformed from within, which demands a more interpretivist approach to human agency. This thesis is a theoretical intervention in the latter dimension of crisis with the aim of building specific analytical models and a general theoretical framework that can account for how agents make sense, interpret and transform a crisis situation. Taking a step back from sociology to phenomenology, Part I of this thesis reconstructs the experience of a crisis. First, I argue that crises represent a particular type of action problem marked by ‘inchoateness’, differentiating them from risks, emergencies, puzzles and akin action problems. Inchoateness refers to a situation in which its organising framework is experienced as problematic, for it fails to orient agents to relevant facts and normative considerations. Second, I argue that organising frameworks – i.e., ‘the background’ – must be construed in normative and hermeneutical ways: it is constitutive by strong values and is open to interpretation. Crisis situations are opaque, normatively unintelligible and factually illegible, and relate to ‘hermeneutical gaps’ at the level of the framework. Third, I argue that the transformative resolution to inchoate situations shares the phenomenological structure of insights. An insight embodies a non-cumulative and non-linear solution which hinges on the transformation of the ways of seeing and ultimately frameworks. In Part II, in dialogue with hermeneutics, practice theory and different sociological approaches, this thesis argues that, in order to account for the situated and transformative sense-making of crisis situations made evident through phenomenology, sociological theory must take a threefold turn in its theorisation of agency, culture, and time. First, theories of agency must encompass the notions associated with the concept of the person – i.e., value-orientation and self-guided projectivity – without dismissing the situated and practical nature of human agency by granting self-interpretation and value-attunement a central role. Second, it argues that theories of meaning and culture must take an expressivist turn capable of encompassing the whole range of symbolic forms (bodily enactment, symbols and concepts) through which agents access, make sense and transform their frameworks. Third, sociological theories must turn to the question of temporalisation, which I differentiate from the question of time. They must account not only for the different temporal orientations of agency (e.g., the past-oriented character of habits and the future-oriented character of imagination), but also for how agency temporalises itself, that is, how it creates critical, non-linear, and non-cumulative transitions in self-understanding. Building upon these discussions, Part II also offers analytical models to account for different types of inchoateness, transformative-interpretative patterns and modalities of temporalisation. Bodily enactment, symbolic figuration and narrative bootstrapping constitute three interpretative patterns through which agents transform their frameworks in moments of crisis and temporalise their self-understanding.Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENESCYT) of the Republic of Ecuado