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- Title
Transforming the Deployment of Patients' Agency: A Case Study of Dialysis Patients' Organizations in Taiwan.
- Authors
Wen-yuan Lin
- Abstract
This paper explores the possibility of theorizing the multitude of Taiwanese dialysis patients' organizations' actions and various impacts. Drawing from the deployment perspective of Michel Foucault and Actor-Network theory, this paper proposes the concept of "deployment of agency" to articulate the constitution and transformation of patients' agency in these actions. Following the deployment perspective, the organizations' ten types of action are specified as "assistive," "supplementary," "transforming," "antagonizing," and "innovative" strategies in terms of their relations to the dialysis regime, which (intend to) interfere with the constitution of patients' agency in terms of its subsistence, institution, identity, and knowledge aspects. This paper also argues that agency is more than a "yes or no" or "enabling or not" issue. The concept of deployment of agency proposes to portray the temporal and spatial configurations, transformation, and stabilization of agency. Apart from specifying patients' situations, this concept might be a plausible candidate for enhancing our practical and theoretical understandings of the self-transformation of social actors and the competing deployments of social regimes.
- Subjects
TAIWAN; HEMODIALYSIS patients; PATIENTS' associations; ACTOR-network theory; THEORY of knowledge; FOUCAULT, Michel, 1926-1984
- Publication
Taiwanese Sociology, 2010, Issue 20, p39
- ISSN
1680-2969
- Publication type
Article