Agency Minds

Plural agency is a dynamic conscious entity with a collective mind that has an internal landscape (Davis, 2000) that defines its personality. This landscape may include cognition, affect/emotion, control, trait orientations, states, and dispositions. Personality cognitive structure facilitates decision making, creating a potential for agency behaviour. In this chapter our interest lies in cognitive aspects of personality, though affect/emotion will be briefly considered in Chapter 6. States and dispositions have already been considered (Table 1.1 and Figure 1.4). Discussions of control will be considered under personality traits.

Cultural agency is a social collective of individuals or groups anchored through culture and maintaining cognitive and affective processes through its personality. While individual personality is well explored in the psychological literature, plural agency personality is a relatively new concept that is more in keeping with social psychology. In order to properly explore the plural agency personality, we shall therefore have to adopt and adapt concepts from psychology and apply them to cultural agency, since social psychology does not currently have the required framework.

Social psychology is more commonly defined as the study of the relationship between human mind(s) and social behaviours. It is the psychology of a structured collection of individuals among which has arisen a normative mind, seated in a noumenal domain operating in a way that may be distinct from that of the individuals that make it up. In Chapter 1 we explained that the noumen used here is not that absolute mental region of Being described by Kant, but rather a more relative one that exists alongside visions, images, ideas, and patterns of thinking. The normative nature often coincides with fuzzy processes that result from the inability of people to adequately understand each other, due ultimately to the principle of knowledge migration (Yolles, 2006).

More or less coherent social collectives like countries and enterprises are durable and develop behaviour by virtue of the noumenal and existential attributes that they have. The noumen houses a normative collective mind through a personality system which is capable of associative projection (after Piaget, 1977: 20), allowing the coordination of perspectives from others in its social environment, and this can influence its behaviour. Such projection involves two kinds of properties: (a) an interrelation or coordination of viewing points that creates an object conception; and (b) the possibility for deductive reasoning through logical processes that enable the determination of relationship consequences.