Agency (sociology)

In social science, agency is the capacity of

individuals to have the power and
resources to fulfill their potential. For
instance, structure consists of those
factors of influence (such as social class,
religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs,
etc.) that determine or limit agents and
their decisions.[1] The influences from
structure and agency are debated—it is
unclear to what extent a person's actions
are constrained by social systems.

One's agency is one's independent

capability or ability to act on one's will.
This ability is affected by the cognitive
belief structure which one has formed
through one's experiences, and the
perceptions held by the society and the
individual, of the structures and
circumstances of the environment one is in
and the position one is born into.
Disagreement on the extent of one's
agency often causes conflict between
parties, e.g. parents and children.
History
The overall concept of agency has existed
since the Enlightenment where there was
debate over whether human freedom was
expressed through instrumental rationality
or moral and norm-based action. John
Locke argued in favor of freedom being
based on self-interest. His rejection of the
binding on tradition and the concept of the
social contract led to the conception of
agency as the capacity of human beings to
shape the circumstances in which they
live.[2] Jean-Jacques Rousseau explored
an alternative conception of this freedom
by framing it as a moral will. There was a
bifurcation between the rational-utilitarian
and non-rational-normative dimensions of
action that Immanuel Kant addressed.
Kant saw freedom as normative grounded
individual will, governed by the categorical
imperative. These ideas were the point of
departure for concerns regarding non-
rational, norm-oriented action in classical
sociological theory contrasting with the
views on the rational instrumental action.[3]

These definitions of agency remained

mostly unquestioned until the nineteenth
century, when philosophers began arguing
that the choices humans make are
dictated by forces beyond their control.[3]
For example, Karl Marx argued that in
modern society, people were controlled by
the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, Friedrich
Nietzsche argued that man made choices
based on his own selfish desires, or the
"will to power" and, famously, Paul Ricœur
added Freud – as a third member of the
"school of suspicion" – who accounted for
the unconscious determinants of human
behavior.[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein's talk of
rule-following and private language
arguments in his Philosophical
Investigations has also made its way into
the discussion of agency, in the work of
Charles Taylor for example.[5]
Definitions and processes
Agency has also been defined in the
American Journal of Sociology as a
temporally embedded process that
encompasses three different constitutive
elements: iteration, projectivity and
practical evaluation.[3] Each of these
elements is a component of agency as a
whole. They are used to study different
aspects of agency independently to make
conclusions about the bigger concept. The
iteration element of agency refers to the
selective reactivation of past patterns of
thought and action. In this way, actors
have routine actions in response to typical
situations that help them sustain identities,
interactions and institutions over time. The
projective element encompasses the
process of imagining possible future
trajectories of action connected to the
actor's hopes, fears, and desires for the
future.[3] The last element, the practical-
evaluative element, entails the capacity of
people to make practical and normative
judgements amongst alternative possible
actions in response to a context, a
demand or a presently evolving situation.[6]
Hewson's classification

Martin Hewson,[7] Associate at the York

Centre for International and Security
Studies, York University, describes three
types of agency: individual, proxy, and
collective. Individual agency is when a
person acts on their own behalf, whereas
proxy agency is when an individual acts on
behalf of someone else (such as an
employer). Collective agency occurs when
people act together, such as a social
movement. Hewson also identifies three
properties of human beings that give rise
to agency: intentionality, power, and
rationality. Human beings act with intention
and are goal oriented. They also have
differing amounts of abilities and
resources resulting in some having greater
agency (power) than others. Finally, human
beings use their intellect to guide their
actions and predict the consequences of
their actions.

In conversation

In his work on conversational agency,

David R. Gibson defines agency as action
that furthers an actor's idiosyncratic
objectives in the face of localized
constraints that also have the potential of
suppressing the very same action.[8]
Constraints such as who is speaking, how
is participation shifted among participants,
and topical and relevance constraints can
impact the possibility of expressing
agency. Seizing the moment when the
"looseness" of such constraints allows,
enables users to express what Gibson
calls "colloquial agency".[9]

Feelings
Social psychologist Daniel Wegner
discusses how an "illusion of control" may
cause people to take credit for events that
they did not cause.[10] These false
judgments of agency occur especially
under stress, or when the results of the
event were ones that the individual desired
(also see self-serving biases). Janet
Metcalfe and her colleagues have
identified other possible heuristics, or rules
of thumb that people use to make
judgments of agency.[11] These include a
"forward model" in which the mind actually
compares two signals to judge agency: the
feedback from a movement, but also an
"efferent copy" – a mental prediction of
what that movement feedback should feel
like. Top down processing (understanding
of a situation, and other possible
explanations) can also influence
judgments of agency. Furthermore, the
relative importance of one heuristic over
another seems to change with age.[12]

From an evolutionary perspective, the

illusion of agency would be beneficial in
allowing social animals to ultimately
predict the actions of others.[13] If one
considers themself a conscious agent,
then the quality of agency would naturally
be intuited upon others. As it is possible to
deduce another's intentions, the
assumption of agency allows one to
extrapolate from those intentions what
actions someone else is likely to perform.
Under other conditions, cooperation
between two subjects with a mutual
feeling of control is what James M. Dow,
Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Hendrix College, defines as "joint
agency."[14] According to various studies
on optimistic views of cooperation, "the
awareness of doing things together jointly
suggest that the experience of subjects
engaging in cooperation involves a positive
here and now experience of the activity
being under joint control."[15] Shared
agency increases the amount of control
between those cooperating in any given
situation, which, in return, could have
negative effects on individuals that the
partners in control associate with. If joint
agency is held by two people that are
already in a position of power, the partners'
heightened feeling of agency directly
affects those who are inferior to them. The
inferiors' sense of agency will most likely
decrease upon the superiors' joint control
because of intimidation and solitude
factors. Although working together
towards a common goal tends to cause an
increased feeling of agency, the inflation of
control could have many unforeseen
consequences.
Children
Children's sense of agency is often not
taken into account because of the
common belief that they are not capable
of making their own rational decisions
without adult guidance.[16]

See also
Action theory
Agency (philosophy)
Agency (psychology)
Negative capability
Paracosm, an alternate reality created
by some people as they develop agency
 Social action
Social relation
Structure and agency
Theory of structuration
Dignity of risk

References
1. Barker, Chris. 2005. Cultural Studies:
Theory and Practice (https://archive.org/de
tails/makingsenseofcul0000bark) .
London: Sage. ISBN 0-7619-4156-8 p448
2. Littlejohn, Stephen W. & Foss, Karen A.
(2009). Agency. In S. Littlejohn, & K. Foss
(Eds.), Encyclopedia of Communication
Theory. (pp. 28–32). Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE Publications, Inc.
3. Emirbayer, M
6. Emirbayer, Mustafa; Mische, Ann (January
1998). "What Is Agency?". American
Journal of Sociology. 103 (4): 962–1023.
doi:10.1086/231294 (https://doi.org/10.10
86%2F231294) . ISSN 0002-9602 (https://
www.worldcat.org/issn/0002-9602) .
S2CID 39562300 (https://api.semanticscho
lar.org/CorpusID:39562300) .
7. Hewson, M. (2010). Agency. In A. Mills, G.
Durepos, & E. Wiebe (Eds.), Encyclopedia of
case study research. (pp. 13-17) (http://ww
w.sage-ereference.com/view/casestudy/n
5.xml) . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications, Inc.
8. Gibson, David R. (November 2000). "Seizing
the Moment: The Problem of
Conversational Agency". Sociological
Theory. 18 (3): 368–382.
doi:10.1111/0735-2751.00106 (https://doi.
org/10.1111%2F0735-2751.00106) .
ISSN 0735-2751 (https://www.worldcat.or
g/issn/0735-2751) . S2CID 145158872 (htt
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9. Gibson, David R. (November 2000). "Seizing
the Moment: The Problem of
Conversational Agency". Sociological
Theory. 18 (3): 368–382.
doi:10.1111/0735-2751.00106 (https://doi.
org/10.1111%2F0735-2751.00106) .
ISSN 0735-2751 (https://www.worldcat.or
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10. Pronin E; Wegner DM; McCarthy K;
Rodriguez S (2006). "Everyday magical
powers: The role of apparent mental
causation in the overestimation of personal
influence". Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology. 91 (2): 218–231.
doi:10.1037/0022-3514.91.2.218 (https://d
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11. Metcalfe, J., Eich, T. S., & Castel, A. D.
(2010). "Metacognition of agency across
the lifespan". Cognition, 267–282.
12. Metcalfe, J., Eich, T. S., & Castel, A. D.
(2010). "Metacognition of agency across
the lifespan". Cognition, 267–282.
13. Rita, Carter (2009). The Human Brain Book.
p. 189.
14. Larkins, C (2019). "Excursions as corporate
agents: A critical realist account of
children's agency" (https://doi.org/10.117
7%2F0907568219847266) . Childhood. 26
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oi.org/10.1177%2F0907568219847266) .
15. Dow, J.M. (2018). "On the Awareness of
Joint Agency: A Pessimistic Account of the
Feelings of Acting Together" (https://doi.or
g/10.1111%2Fjosp.12222) . J Soc Philos.
49: 161–182. doi:10.1111/josp.12222 (http
s://doi.org/10.1111%2Fjosp.12222) .
 16. Larkins, C (2019). "Excursions as corporate
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children's agency" (https://doi.org/10.117
7%2F0907568219847266) . Childhood. 26
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