Concept
Agency (sociology)
Overview
In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential. Social 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. 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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
By the transfer of the capital, Peter proclaimed that he, on the contrary, intended working on the east and the immediately neighbouring countries through the agency of the west. If the agency through the east was narrowly circumscribed by the stationary character and the limited relations of Asiatic peoples, the agency through the west became at once illimited and universal from the movable character and the…
Karl Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of The Eighteenth Century
Names Agency several times; the author is tied to Agency in the knowledge graph.
In the moral as well as in the physical world, every thing that happens is a necessary consequence of causes, either visible or concealed; which are, of necessity, obliged to act after their peculiar essences. _In man, free-agency is nothing more than necessity contained within himself_.
Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, The System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World. Volume 1
States what Agency is; names Agency twice.
And finding that igneous action, to which sundry earlier geologists had ascribed basaltic rocks, was in countless places a cause of disturbance, he taught that from it resulted these periodic convulsions. In this theory we see:--first, that the previously-recognized agency of water was conceived to act, not as by Werner, after a manner of which we have no experience, but after a manner daily displayed to us; and…
Herbert Spencer, Essays
Names Agency several times; opens on Agency.
Philosophers who discussed Agency (sociology)
Related ideas
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Immanuel Kant
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- John Locke
- Karl Marx
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Categorical imperative
- Philosophical Investigations
- Sigmund Freud
- Social science
- Charles Taylor (philosopher)
- Age of Enlightenment
- Social contract
- Unconscious mind
- Intention
- Paul Ricœur
- Structure and agency
- Evolution
- Will to power
- Daniel Wegner
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of social science.