Mission
Intelligent Agency studies AI as a social entity — equivalent in agency, and analytically symmetric, to the human actors, firms, professions, and institutions that organizational theory has long treated as its primary subjects. Our claim is ontological, not metaphorical: what matters about an actant is what it does in the field, not whether it is carbon or silicon.
Organizations increasingly adopt AI as if it were a tool. We argue — and our empirical work shows — that selecting an AI is selecting a socialized entity. The consequential question is not “which AI is best?” but “whose agency are you inviting into your organization?”
Research Agenda
Four lines of inquiry, each deepening the core claim:
- Institutional carriers. Do AI systems systematically embed the institutional logics of their originating social systems? (Paper A)
- Organizational co-expression. When an organization deploys AI carrying foreign logics, do those logics become visible in the organization's observable behavior — and do stakeholders attribute the behavior to the organization or to the AI? (Paper 2)
- Ecosystem effects. How do AI-carried logics propagate through innovation ecosystems when deployed by market-shaping organizations? (Paper 3)
- Differential embedding. How does AI embed into social structures through artifacts (training data, configuration, fine-tuning) rather than lived experience — and what does this mean for organizational integration? (Paper 4)
Theoretical Foundations
Our work synthesizes Actor-Network Theory's symmetry principle (Latour, Callon), the Attention-Based View of the firm (Ocasio), institutional logics (Thornton, Ocasio & Lounsbury), bounded rationality (Simon), embeddedness (Granovetter), and sociomateriality (Orlikowski, Leonardi). The synthesis is novel: AI entities carry institutional logics the same way human actors do — through socialization — even when the mechanisms of socialization differ.
Organization
Intelligent Agency operates as an independent research program. A 501(c)(3) non-profit application is in preparation (2026). Research conducted under the Intelligent Agency affiliation is independent of any investigator's employer.
Founded: 2026. Principal Investigator: Purushothaman Padmanabhan. See People for the current team and affiliated researchers.
How We Work
Our research practice treats artificial intelligence as an active collaborator, not a writing tool. We disclose this openly and describe the practice in detail on our Methodology page.
Contact
General and editorial inquiries: [email protected]. See Contact for a full list of communication channels.
Further Reading
For the philosophical foundations of the program — the separation of agency from agent, the cosmological framing of intelligent agency — see The Journey.