Agency lost and recovered: A social constructionist approach to smoking addiction and recovery
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deterministic, disease models of addiction assume human agency is co-opted by a biologically-driven compulsion to engage in the addictive behaviour. A central tenet of counselling, on the other hand, is that clients are agents of their own change [Beatch, R., Bedi, R.P., Cave, D., Domene, J.F., Harris, G.E., Haverkamp, B.E., & Mikhail, A.-M. 2009. Counselling psychology in a Canadian context: Report from the executive committee for a Canadian understanding of counselling psychology. Ottawa, Ontario: Counselling Psychology Section of the Canadian Psychological Association. Retrieved from http://www.cpa.ca/cpasite/userfiles/Documents/sections/counselling/CPA-CNPSY-Report-Final%20nov%2009.pdf]. Our essay explores this agency divide between theory and practice, and proposes that attention to agentic language [Davies, J.B. (1997). Drugspeak: The analysis of drug discourse. London: Informa Health Care; Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Notes for lectures on “private experience” and “sense data”. The Philosophical Review, 77, 275–320; Zidjaly, N. (2009). Agency as an interactive achievement. Language in Society, 38, 177–200] and use of discursive therapy techniques (e.g. narrative therapy, [White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York, NY: W.W. Norton]) from a social constructionist perspective [Burr, V. (2003). Social constructionism (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge; Burr, V. (1995). An introduction to social constructionism. London: Routledge; Gergen, K.J. (1994). Realities and relationships: Soundings in social constructionism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]) can help reconcile the agency divide. Agency is conditionally defined as the biologically and socio-culturally-mediated capacity to act [Ahearn, L.M. (2001). Why agency now? Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109–137]. Furthermore, all human action has a reciprocal relationship in shaping, enacting and responding to our biological substrates and socio-cultural context. Brief narratives from smokers are presented and analysed within the anti-smoking policy environment where they live. Smokers claim agency for themselves as they make personal meaning of their smoking, and disclaim agency as they submit to dominant explanations of smoking as an addiction or a disease. These agentic turns can be found in how the smokers talk about addiction. This spectrum of responsible agency appears to be mediated by social expectations and context. The smokers’ narratives are used as a springboard to (1) further explicate a social constructionist approach to the agency paradox in addiction and (2) to show how counsellors may listen for agentic language and use discursive therapeutic approaches in treating addiction.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it