Collective Agency and Institutional Personhood: Structural Criteria for Organization-Level Action

Function in corpus

Bridges individual agency and governance by formalizing collective agency, institutional personhood, and organization-level responsibility.

Details

Connected papers: Agency, Salience, and Free Will; Vulnerability as a Structural Condition; Witnessing Under Vulnerability; Partial Agency and Mixed Responsibility; Ethics as Emergent Constraint Regimes; Responsibility, Law, and Moral Practice; Legitimacy as a Finite Structural Resource; Authority, Responsibility, and Force; Logistics as a Distinct Regime. This paper isolates the structural conditions under which a multi-locus organization itself becomes the relevant agentive unit. It distinguishes architectures that merely mediate interaction among independent loci from architectures that determine admissibility within a unified persistent system, where the organization's own structure becomes necessary to explain what happens. Collective agency obtains when a persisting constraint architecture integrates contributions, modulates future trajectories, and remains invariant under substitution of participating loci. Institutional personhood is then treated as a stabilized form of such agency: role-mediated continuity, persistence of commitments across member turnover, cross-system identity, and organization-level consequence uptake. The paper also analyzes institutional degradation: organizations that retain formal identity while losing real constraint integration, producing nominal or coordination-shell forms that look institutional but no longer function as integrated agentive loci. This closes a load-bearing gap between individual agency and the governance arc by clarifying when responsibility and authority attach to the organization itself.

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