Agency for Justice: Theorizing Pathways to Structural Change

• In Event: Responding to Structural Injustice

Abstract

How can structural injustice be overcome? Theorists of structural injustice ascribe individuals with the political responsibility to tackle structural injustice (Young 2011), and typically suggest participating in social movements or disruptive politics as a way to discharge that responsibility. But this dominant account is rather vague on the pathways to structural change. The paper identifies a theoretical lacuna in the dominant approach that gives rise to the vagueness: its neglect of the problem of agency that hinder agents from acting upon responsibility. Agency, here, refers to individuals’ political agency or their possession of “the power to bring about effective change in collective life” (Coole 2005) with regard to unjust structures. To map out complete pathways to structural change, normative theorizing must inquire whether and how to ensure individuals have the agency to place impersonal structures under normatively sound collective control.
The dominant approach neglects the problem of agency largely in two ways. First, it mistakenly presumes that individuals already have sufficient agency to tackle structural injustice. While the dominant account attributes responsibility to individuals based on their collective power to change the unjust structures, it says nothing about the conditions of coordination necessary to realize that latent power, such as mutual knowledge of the desire to contribute, and mechanisms for communication and coordination. It seems to presuppose that individual discharges of responsibility will guarantee the success of collective action, and that individuals can readily contribute to collective action if only they are morally determined to take up responsibility. Second, the dominant approach emphasizes one way individuals in which can be agents of justice, namely by joining disruptive politics, without a principled reason. By abstracting individuals too much from their social positions and collective associations, it misses opportunities to specify where individuals could intervene other than by joining the rallies as one of many individuals. It says little about what long-term changes would need to be made within these institutions as they are the normal channels of social and political life that contribute to structural injustice. Combined, the dominant approach presents an incomplete account of how to overcome structural injustice by being inattentive to constraints to individual action and underspecifying the content and sites of structural change.
To provide a better roadmap to structural change, the problem of agency that stand in the way between responsibility and action should be tackled head-on. The primary question of agency that normative theorizing around structural injustice must ask is whether individuals have sufficient agency over structures. Agency consists of two parts: individual initiative driven by motivation and efficacy. Efficacy, in turn, depends on social coordination and material availability that make individual initiatives fruitful (Krause 2017), implying that normative theorizing around structural injustice should not only urge individuals to do the most practical thing within their options but also critique the pre-existing social and political arrangements that condition their options. Secondary questions of agency concern how to ensure that individuals have this agency. Questions related to spreading knowledge, cultivating dispositions to take responsibility for structural injustice, and retaining motivational sustainability are related to the former component of agency; questions on conditions and mechanisms for collective action and creating or identifying accessible avenues for political action are related to the latter.
The lack of efficacy is especially debilitating because, currently, even motivated individuals cannot act effectively vis-à-vis structures. Although individuals have some agency as consumers, workers, and citizens, these traditional forms of agency fall short in transforming structures. Individuals need accessible, coordinated, and predictable means of driving structural change that are comparable to the impersonal processes in their efficacy at producing social outcomes. By thinking of structural change in terms of changing social relations, the paper suggests that ensuring agency would require, in principle, establishing channels accessible to individual occupants of social positions to voice their concerns and ultimately be able to correct the aspects of a social relation that contribute to structural injustice. Practically, this would amount to opening up avenues of deliberation in the key intersections of social relations, such as corporations and government agencies. With this specified content of structural change in mind, various ways in which individuals, in their different social positions and collective associations, try to advance in this direction can be identified as valid pathways to structural change.

Author

• Kyuree Kim, McGill University