Where the Action is: Distributed Agency between Humans, Machines, and Programs
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"In this paper it is argued that the advanced technologies take part in the course and constellation of human action and that they do this with real effects, not only metaphorically. The first part starts with the search for a useful concept of agency that enables the researcher to describe and classify all activities that contribute to the performance of an action. The concept shall include different levels of human agency as well as different levels of technologies in action. The following chapter treats the consequences that these activations of technologies have for the human-technology-relation. If technologies change their role from passive means into agents and mediators, then the narrow concept of instrumental action should be replaced by a broader concept of inter-agency. This part of the paper culminates in the presentation of a gradual model of agency that can be used to describe and discriminate between different levels and grades of action without any regard to the ontological status of the acting unit, may it be human-like or machine-like. In the second part of the paper the question 'What is the adequate unit of action?' is answered. It starts with a thought experiment about the question: Who is really flying the Airbus? We learn from both views, the humanist's and the technologist's one, that what is usually called action, like flying 240 tourists to Tenerife airport, consists of many distributed actions that have to be coordinated by social organization or te…
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Engineering disciplines tend to leave organizational factors out of their equations, but also social sciences and management studies focus strongly on distributed agency between human and machine, addressing the organization often just as a static environmental condition than as a dynamic set of actors and rules.
“It may not be surprising that engineering disciplines tend to leave organizational factors out of their equations, but also social sciences and management studies focus strongly on the”
From Keeping the organization in the loop: a socio-technical extension of human-centered artificial intelligence (2023) · cites this paper as Rammert 2008
Cites
Socio-Technical Agency in Financial Markets: The Case of the Stock Ticker
Preda, A. (2006) · Social Studies of Science · doi:10.1177/0306312706059543 · Cited by 218 · see citing works
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Rise of Machine Agency: A Framework for Studying the Psychology of Human–AI Interaction (HAII)
Sundar, S. S. (2020) · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication · doi:10.1093/jcmc/zmz026 · Cited by 871 · see citing works
Herrmann, T., & Pfeiffer, S. (2023) · AI & SOCIETY · doi:10.1007/s00146-022-01391-5 · Cited by 173 · see citing works
One AI Does Not Fit All: A Cluster Analysis of the Laypeople’s Perception of AI Roles
Kim, T., Molina, M. D., Rheu, M. (., Zhan, E. S., & Peng, W. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3544548.3581340 · Cited by 68 · see citing works
Zhang, S., Wang, H., & Yi, X. (2025) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3757594 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
- Authors
- Rammert, W.
- Corresponding author
- Rammert, Werner
- ORCID
- Rammert, Werner
- Venue
- Kultur- und Medientheorie
- Publisher
- transcript Verlag
- Published
- 2008-10-27
- Pages
- 62-91
- ISSN
- 2702-9999 (ISSN-L)
- 2703-0016
- OpenAlex
- W1625578742
- Cited by
- 103
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 8.21
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Kultur- und Medientheorie (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- transcript Verlag eBooks (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Social Science Open Access Repository (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Universität Bielefeld
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Information Systems Theories and Implementation
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
- Keywords
- distributed agency, human-technology relations, concept of agency, instrumental behavior, human-machine interaction, machine agency, social organization, autonomous systems
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