212 Nancy T. Ammerman
do we understand the human person to be an agent in the creation of her or his own
persona? Are groups free to define themselves, or are they defined by powerful others?
The answer to those questions begins with the recognition that social action is guided
by patterned regularities, social-constructed categories that organize our experience and
thinking. We simply respond to the world in terms of what we think we already know
about it. There are cognitive and psychological reasons, as much as social ones, for the
fundamental way in which human thinking depends on socially constructed categories
(DiMaggio 1997).
Agency is located, then, not in freedom from patterned constraint but in our ability
to invoke those patterns in nonprescribed ways, enabled in large measure by the very
multiplicity of solidarities in which we participate. Sewell (1992) locates agency in
the fact that actors always occupy multiple structures and can import resources and
schemas (“rules” or categories of understanding) from one to another – what he calls
transposability. The rules that tell me who I am at work are not the same rules that
guide my behavior at home or at church. Minow observes similarly that all identities
are “intersectional,” that we are always many things as once – female, white, Catholic,
disabled, daughter, and the like (Minow 1997: 38ff). Indeed, part of the experience
of education is to gain access to the schemas of cultures in distant times and places,
adding other voices to the conversation about how life should proceed.
Emirbayer and Mische (1998) locate agency in the play of structures across time,
as well as across institutions and space. They point to the human ability to bring past,
present, and future into play at any given moment and to choose which “past” is
the relevant one. They call this the “iterational element” of action. It is located in our
ability to categorize (if this is an X, then I do Y) and in our necessary formation of habits,
which are not automatic butareshaped into “settled dispositions.” These theorists take
very seriously, then, the real power of existing schemas and their ability to produce
predictable “strategies of action” (Swidler 1986), but the equally real ability of actors to
invoke those strategies in unpredictable ways.
The movement across institutions and time is not, of course, done on a perfectly
level playing field. Some actors have a disproportionate ability to mobilize human,
symbolic, and material resources in the service of perpetuating or altering patterns of
interaction. Sewell, like Bourdieu, points out that some actors can simply manipulate
situations and conversations to their own symbolic and material advantage (Sewell
1992). Still, because we do not live in an enclosed world with only one pattern of
resource allocation, no single situation is fully determined by itself. We constantly
import rules from one situation into another new or unfamiliar one. Identities, then,
need to be understood as structured by existing rules and schemas, constrained by
existing distributions of resources and power, but also malleable in the everyday reality
of moving across institutional contexts and among symbolic worlds.
What each of these theorists has provided is explication for the dynamic nature of
each social encounter. We never arrive on the scene as a single identity, but always carry
with us the multiple entanglements of our past and present. The very multiplicity of our
identities makes agency possible (cf. Coser 1991). Acting within and between structures,
across time and space, we cumulatively build up a persona and collectively shape the
solidarities of which we are a part. Those personas and solidarities are themselves,
then, both structures that constrain future action and sites for continuous revision and
improvisation.