Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? How do we explain their behaviour? Can we treat them as accountable for their actions? List and Pettit offer original arguments, grounded in cutting-edge work on social choice, economics, and philosophy, to show there really are group agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them.

"Dimensions of Shared Agency" investigates the way in which standard philosophical accounts have been dealing with the issue of collective actions. In particular, the book focuses on the ‘Big Five’ of analytical social ontology (namely, Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, Philip Pettit, John R. Searle and Raimo Tuomela) and their accounts of shared/collective intentions and actions. Through systematic readings of different positions in the debate, the author proposes original ways of analyzing and classifying current theories of shared agency according to whether they advance a member-level or a group-level account of shared agency. While member-level accounts (MLA) are theories of shared agency based on individuals’ attitudes and actions, group-level accounts (GLA) give attention to the group of individuals considered as a whole, i.e., as an agent itself. Criticism arises against the idea that the Big Five have proposed stable group-level accounts suitable for explaining the case of shared agency as a group-level phenomenon. The widespread tendency in the debate is to endorse a perspective called holistic individualism, which maintains that high-level explanations are objective even though social facts are ontologically reducible to facts about individuals. Lasagni argues that as long as holistic individualism is held, the GLA is reducible to the MLA because holistic individualism upholds ontological individualism based on a deep individualistic premise, fixing the special status of individual agents as natural persons. The premise makes the claim to treat groups as agents contradictory to the general framework of the theory. This book profiles an alternative interpretation according to which agency should be considered as a functional kind, which is equally instantiated by different systems, such as individual human beings and organized social groups. In this way, the author claims, the reduction of the social can be avoided. "Dimensions of Shared Agency" will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars interested in social ontology and the philosophy of the social sciences. It can also be utilised as supplementary reading or an introduction to philosophy students and scholars who are first approaching the philosophy of collective intentionality and shared agency.

A Pragmatic Approach to Agency in Group Activity builds towards an action theory that explains how new forms agency develop in group activity. The approach starts from practical insights about group activity and develops a new understanding of agency from there. This study shows how practical interactions and structures in group activity disrupt individual agency. It is concluded that important features of agency can be realized on a group level. Different types of group activities are analyzed in order to better understand these mechanisms and, consequently, revisit our understanding of agency. It is argued that „intentionality,“ the key concept in individual action theory, merely serves as a pseudo-explanatory connection between specific features of agency and their realization in humans. This is contrasted with empirical research showing that how humans act is far from the idealized concept of intentionality. Consequently, intentionality as a key explanatory concept is rejected and replaced by a diverse set of features of agency for a similarly diverse set of kinds of agency. In this view, groups display new forms agency beyond individual agency without making the groups agents themselves. Such is the nature of group agency.

Special edition of the Federal Register, containing a codification of documents of general applicability and future effect ... with ancillaries.

A report of the development of a service to housing estate community groups by the London Council of Social Service, based on 15 years of field work experience using the community development approach and method. First Published in 1969. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.