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Material parts in social structures

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-11-11, 09:32 authored by Dave Elder-Vass
There has been much debate on whether and how groups of human agents can constitute social structures with causal significance. Both sides in this debate, however, implicitly privilege human individuals over non-human material objects and tend to ignore the possibility that such objects might also play a significant role in social structures. This paper argues that social entities are often composed of both human agents and non-human material objects, and that both may make essential contributions to their causal influence. In such cases the causal influence of social structures should be attributed to the emergent causal powers of socio-technical entities.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Journal of Social Ontology

Volume

3

Issue

1

Pages

89-105

Citation

ELDER-VASS, D., 2017. Material parts in social structures. Journal of Social Ontology, 3 (1), pp. 89-105.

Publisher

De Gruyter © Dave Elder-Vass

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Acceptance date

2016-10-11

Publication date

2017-01-07

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by De Gruyter under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Full details of this licence are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

ISSN

2196-9655

eISSN

2196-9663

Language

  • en