THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF NONHUMAN AGENCY - THE CASE OF MENTAL DISORDER

In diverse ways, constructionist studies demonstrate the profound rele vance of social processes to the emergence and assessment of mental di sorders in various organisational settings. However, there remains a c urious silence in the constructionist literature regarding how menial disorders, once assembled as meaningful objects of discourse and pract ice, might come to exercise their own causal influences upon members' experiences and activities. In this paper, I draw upon the notion of s ocial problems work to provide for the practical dynamics whereby memb ers, in effect, animate the categorical objects that they presume to p opulate their worlds. More than enacting identifiable objects of socia l problems discourse, social problems work at times actually realizes these objects as causally influential non-human agents, such that one may find members interacting with these objects much as they do with o ne another in the ongoing production of local affairs. While the analy sis presented in this paper concerns the social construction of mental disorders as causally influential non-human agents, it is intended as a case study of the more general phenomenon.