agency

cultural studies

sociology

is, for the poststructuralist, problematic because the free rational actor that agency assumes mirrors the logic of modernity. A free social agent is nothing but the flip-side of a belief in an instrumentally rational society.

The historian's task is 'to explain' action in terms of a freedom that presupposs agency in this sense. post-structuralist have been critical of this historiographical gesture because, for one thing, the subject it empowers mirrors the logic of modernity as the birth of rationality: the modern social system and the freedom of its populace face each other in an abyss of resemblance. An instrumentally rational society and a free social agent are two sides of the same coin' (Poster 101).

is concerned with everyday resistance, the way individuals and groups practice a strategy of appropriation in response to structures of domination.

Cultural studies may be defined as an interdisciplinary, critial, and historical investigation of aspects of everyday life with a particular empahsis on the problem of resistance-- the way individauls and groups practice a strategy of appropriation in response to structures of domination' (Poster 1992:94).

is a discipline whose discursive truth is identical with the truth of the discourse of bureaucracy?

Similarly, Poster (1990: 36), echoing Foucault's observations about 'the objectifying social sciences,' observes that 'the ''truth' of the discourses of bureaucracy and sociology are identical.' The coincidence of sociology and bureaucratic surveillance is perhaps best exemplified -by the infamous 'Sociology Department' of the early Ford Motor Company. This unit was assigned the task of keeping the company's employees under surveillance during working hours and during leisure time. Its duties included the moral regulation of liquor and tobacco consumption and other vices. Using sociology to discipline the worker as a consumer came later (Ettema and Whitney 1994).

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