Chapter 4: Organized Action: Agency, (In)capabilities and Means

One of the main features of human life is the organization of interaction. Our social existence simply cannot be imagined without clubs, companies, religious communities, protest movements, schools, factories, administrations, hospitals, etc. It is thus quite evident that organized action has to form part of a study on human capabilities and the means by which people act. Before we go further, I need to explain why I speak about “organized action” from the outset.1 Using this term allows me to keep action central to my approach, so as to gain a view on the full variety of a specific aspect of action. On the one hand, organized action is a much more general phenomenon than actions within organizations such as bureaucracies or companies, which are formalised under the name “organization”. On the other hand, the varieties of organized action display a range of levels of formality, which is important to account for if one wants to understand what is “organizational” about them. Both of these points may be illustrated with the example of the “informal economy”2: its informality is also a version of organized action, albeit less structured than “organizations” in the narrower sense. While my approach remains a theorizing of action, I will not refrain from using the word “organizations”. This is not merely due to convention. Part of the discussion consists of advancing an action theoretical ontology of organizations – variations in the size and complexity of organizations can only be properly accounted for by studying them as extensions of organized action. This first approximation of organized action is required in order to demarcate the theme of the current survey. I defend two theses. The first is that organizations, as the outcome of and basis for organized action, have a specific agency, of which the ac-