Researchers who build autonomous agents are primarily interested in integrating the aspects of agency which were once thought decomposable and independent. A theory of agency for everyday worlds must address the problems that an agent has a limited time to plan, and that an agent must be able to cope with an incomplete domain physics. The Case-based Agency projects at the AI Lab at the Universi...

Previous research has suggested that systems that are designed according to existing methodology fail in routine contexts whereas others that have evolved in such contexts without a traditional methodology work better. In previous work we have suggested that this is because the theory about purposeful activity that underlies the design of a system has an impact on the success of the system in p...

The field of cloud computing is strongly affected by conflicts of interest between providers and users of resources. A comprehensive and integrative model for representing and analyzing these conflicts on a theoretically well-founded basis is, however, still lacking. Therefore, this paper establishes such a model based on economic agency theory. Employing two realistic example scenarios, we ide...

Consistent with the bidirectional perspective on parent-child relations, the current study examined children’s perceptions of agency in the context of marital conflict. A storytelling task was completed by 115 five-year-old children, tapping perceived agency. These children and their mothers and fathers completed measures of marital conflict at two time points. Consistent with clinical theory a...

The present research investigates cultural variation in grounding principles for inferring agency in order to address an important theoretical debate: does cultural diversity in agency concepts reflect an animistic overextension of (universal) folkpsychology, as many have argued, or an alternative theory of folkcommunication based on relational principles? In two experiments, mind perception me...

Many opponents of free-will libertarianism argue that libertarian free agency is unintelligible. The aim of my talk is to answer them by suggesting that a coherent conception of libertarian freedom is possible if (and, possibly, only if) we adopt dispositionalism as the explanatory framework of human agency. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I classify the existing explanations of human a...

This paper argues that the advent of the WWW and the principles now developing for the move ‘social machines’ has posed serious challenges to traditional social theory. In particular, it is argued that the concept of social machines and the forms of distributed agency they imply amplify ‘deep flaws’ in the underlying principles of current agency theories that make empirical work using such fram...

The purpose of this work is to systematically develop a micro-level understanding of endogenous agency in a highly institutionalized, stable setting as a basis for a general institutional theory of action. Using an ethnographic account of Cambridge’s 2007 season preparations for the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race we examine endogenous agency in an environment where extant institutional t...

A long-standing debate in the IS literature concerns the relationship between technology and organization. Is it technology that acts on organizations, or humans that determine how technology is used? Proposals for a middle way between the extremes of technological and social determinism have been put forward based on Giddens’ structuration theory, and, more recently, from actor network theory....

Since the 1980s, a number of frameworks have been proposed for understanding the concept of information system (IS) failure. Two approaches to IS failures seem particularly important: the concept of Expectation Failure and the concept of Termination Failure. We argue that there is an extra dimension to the problem that is not covered by those descriptive models, which we call the Outsourced IS ...