My concern in this chapter is to address analytically the role of agency in a com munication-based perspective on organizing. Recent debates centering on agency and text in organizing1have relied primarily on a notion of agency inherited from social theory, and in particular from interpretive sociologies, and thus, I argue, have been trapped in a logic of discourse or agency, depending on which is ac corded analytic priority in accounting for the dynamic of organizing. For the most part, the debates have been limited to exploring the opposition between internalist and externalist notions of agency (or, to caricaturize somewhat, modem vs. postmodern views).

In certain respects, the contemporary debates can be viewed as yet one more installment of the classic debate between free will and determinism. Some would encourage us to remain anchored in the Kantian idealist conception of agent, de fending in a humanistic style of argument the uniqueness of its symbolic and ra tionalist capabilities in a world that is otherwise chaotic and meaningless (Giddens, 1984; McPhee, 2004). Others insist that agency does not account for much once it has been extracted from the structural properties of the social and in stitutional contexts in which it is inevitably located (Alexander, 1988, 1998; Descombes, 1996). Still others urge us to abandon the metaphysical discourse and acknowledge that current historical conditions and technological develop ments make the idealist notion of agent at best a very poor conceptual tool to un derstand the unfolding transformations of social life (Latour, 1993). Fieldwork in the social studies of science and technology, for example, goes so far as to argue for the need to incorporate the notion of material agency in our modes of explana tion of human engagement in its surroundings (Cooren, 2004b, chap. 5, this vol ume; Latour, 1996; Pickering, 1995). At stake, of course, is an issue of definition, that is, how agency is analytically broken down into its basic components by the different traditions. However, there is more to it. I suggest in the following pages that recent developments in social and communication theory, marked in many