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• W4379792017 abstract "Religion in Urban America Program: Chicago Conversations Elfriede Wedam Structure, agency, and adaptation in congregations In debates over the relationship between structure and agency, Lowell Livezey took the position that religion as an institution, in particular the congregation, had “agency.” By this he meant that the structures in which all social activity is nested could be changed by the cultural impact of religion. He contrasted agency with adaptation, the process by which congregations adjusted to forces in their environment but did not act positively—which often meant normatively—on it. I would like to discuss this tension between agency and adaptation, why I think Livezey found it provocative, although it remained preliminary in his work, and how I think Livezey might have wanted to push it further. In much of Livezey’s work, he was engrossed in the problems of how to change structures of inequality and rebuild forms of community, and how religious organizations could be leaders in achieving these ends. He rejected traditional approaches of urban ministry, based on the Protestant concept of noblesse oblige, because of their limited scope and insufficient attention to and ability to work with the social structural sources of resistance to change. To that end he engaged in scholarly explorations of what he termed religious agency. His central question on agency was how congregations that are themselves embedded in the structures that constrain action, such as meaningful social integration among members, be agents for changing those very structures? Rather than being merely a recipient of the push of economic and political forces, i.e., a dependent variable, Livezey asked how religious groups are a part of the “ensemble of forces” that act on the social system. Livezey wanted churches and other religious congregations to be transformative, and he often found that they wanted to be so as well. With this goal, it is not easy to accept religion as subject to the determination of other systems. In the language of social science, individuals are presumed to have agency, but how groups or institutions possess agency is less clear. Some writers deny that groups (much less institutions) can be said to possess agency. Others forge ahead without theoretically specifying how group agency happens. In addition, we can observe that agency is multidimensional—connoting a range of meanings—“selfhood, motivation, will, purposiveness, intentionality, choice, initiative, freedom, and creativity” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998:962). This leaves much ambiguity in the meaning of agency and Livezey worked in the midst of that ambiguity. But Livezey was above all an empiricist, much inspired by the grounded theory approach in which the data provided (almost all) the leads into conceptual meaning. The “actions” taken by congregations is clearly a group representation of the choices individuals within congregations make. Sometimes individuals in those groups work cohesively and in a unitary direction; other times they fragment into conflicting views that either stymie an anticipated direction or result in organizational splits. As Durkheim pointed out, a group is larger than the sum of its parts and the identity and purpose of a group exceeds the identity and purpose of any individual within it. I do not claim to theorize the behavior of groups in this short piece, yet we can also observe, as Livezey did, that groups such as congregations “act” when moving to a new location, invest in additional property, or send its Peace and Justice Committee to participate in a rebuilding project in New Orleans. Livezey would have found Hans Joas, a German sociologist in the American pragmatic tradition, whose work I just recently came across, most provocative in this regard. Joas suggests a theory of creative action in which the conception of action “needs to be reconstructed in such a way that this conception is no longer confined to the alternative of a model of rational action versus normatively oriented action, but is able to incorporate the creative dimension of human action into its conceptual structure” (Joas 1996:72). From this perspective action is no longer a choice between means‐ends rationality (entirely individualistic) and normatively determined (entirely subject to the binding power of tradition), but a framework that incorporates human choices and decisions. “By participating in the organizations..." @default.
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• W4379792017 title "Religion in Urban America Program Chicago Conversations" @default.
• W4379792017 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/cro.2008.a782425" @default.
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