Overview
Grammars of action are formal representations that decompose human activities into sequences of discrete, trackable steps. The concept originates in Agre's AI work on representing routine activity but takes on a much broader significance in his social theory of surveillance and capture.
In the AI context, grammars of action were Agre's alternative to classical planning representations — rather than representing goals and plans, they represent the structure of ongoing, situated activity. In the social context, they describe how institutions impose formal structure on previously informal practices in order to make those practices computationally tractable.
The Double Life of the Concept
What makes grammars of action distinctive in Agre's thought is that they serve as a bridge between his technical and critical work. The same concept that was a contribution to AI (a better way to represent activity) became a tool for social analysis (a way to understand how computation restructures human life). This is critical technical practice in action — technical concepts that carry critical insight.