Ontological Distinctiveness and the Emergence of Purposes

Abstract

In their wide-ranging analysis of scholarship on human agency, Emirbayer and Mische (Am J Soc 103:962–1023, 1998) claim:

[In contrast to Bourdieu and Giddens]…we maintain that human actors do not merely repeat past routines; they are also the inventors of new possibilities for thought and action’. [Actors] ‘distance themselves’ [from the past, using capacities] ‘rang[ing] from the strongly purposive terminology of goals, plans and objectives to the more ephemeral language of dreams, wishes, desires, anxieties, hopes, fears and aspirations…[W]e term it the projective dimension of human agency. (p. 984)

And indeed, the ideal new model worker Beckett and Hager (Life, work and learning: practice in postmodernity. Routledge, London, 2002) is expected to take responsibility for her or his own flexible work future—even to the point of reinventions of selfhood by upgrading of skills or competence (cf Beckett. Educ Philos Theory 36:497–508, 2004) and of desirable moral characteristics, like honesty, reliability and ‘integrity’ (wholeness).

Epistemological and ethical debates crowd in immediately. However, as we work ourselves into a sweat over employability, what is often lost in such debates are crucial intersubjective, and therefore relational, phenomena known popularly as group- or teamwork, peer practices and malpractices (such as in professional work) and communitarian appeals to ‘standards’ of various kinds.

Drawing on recent and current publications (Beckett. Adult learning: philosophical issues. Peterson P, Baker E and McGaw B (eds), International encyclopedia of education, vol 6. Elsevier, Oxford, pp 114–120, 2010; Of maestros and muscles: expertise and practices at work. Aspin D and Chapman J (eds) International handbook of lifelong learning, 2nd edn. Springer, Netherlands, 2011 in review, Radomski and Beckett 2010 in press), I want to explore the conceptual rigour of a ‘projective’ dimension to human agency where what is agentive is growth in our capacity to learn from each other over time. The approach I take is broadly Wittgensteinian, and the interest I have is teleological. I enquire into the purposive nature of work, where the group acts together on agreed projects. In short, can the projective dimension of agency emerge from our relations with each other?