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Agency and Discourse: Recruiting Consultants in a Life Insurance Company

Tim Newton

This paper applies the work of Callon in attempting to explore the relation between discourse and agency in an analysis of the hiring of management consultants by a large life insurance organisation, `Lifeco'. The data focus on the recruitment and deployment of management consultants within Lifeco, and explore the actor network relevant to this process. As well as examining the `moments' of translation within the network, attention is paid to the degree of longer term `convergence' (Callon 1991) around the consultant's work within Lifeco. Whilst acknowledging the advantage of Callon's work to exploring agency and discourse, the paper remains critical of certain aspects of his theorising, especially the question of access to particular locations in an actor network.

Key Words: agency • discourse • actor networks • management of knowledge

Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 4, 717-739 (1996)
DOI: 10.1177/0038038596030004006
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