Agency (philosophy)
Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. In some contexts, the exercise of agency is linked to questions of moral responsibility, and may pertain to questions of moral agency.
Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or purposeful, goal directed activity. An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their physical activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In 'goal directed action' an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.
Human agency
Human agency entails the claim that humans make decisions and enact them on the world, independent of whether it is deterministically or through free will. This is in contrast with objects reacting to natural forces, devoid of any thinking capacity. In this respect, agency does not necessitate free will.In philosophy
The philosophical discipline in charge of studying agency is action theory. In certain philosophical traditions, human agency is a collective, historical dynamic, rather than a function arising out of individual behavior. Hegel's Geist and Marx's universal class are idealist and materialist expressions of this idea of humans treated as social beings, organized to act in concert. There is ongoing debate, philosophically derived in part from the works of Hume, between determinism and indeterminacy.Structure and agency forms an enduring core debate in sociology. Essentially the same as in the Marxist conception, "agency" refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices, based on their will, whereas "structure" refers to those factors that seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have.
In sociology
Within sociology, agency occurs when an agent engages with the social structure. The primacy of the social structure vs. individual capacity regarding an agent's actions is debated within sociology. This debate includes influence of reflexivity on an agent's actions.In economics
Economics stresses the purposive action of economic agents, who act to advance their subjective well-being given fundamental constraints. Thus, economic models typically begin with "an agent" maximizing some objective. In contract theory, economics also addresses the problem of agents who represent another party potentially unfaithfully.In psychology
The term of agency used in different fields of psychology with different meaning. It can refer to the ability of recognizing agents or attributing agency to objects based on simple perceptual cues or principles, for instance the principle of rationality, which holds that context-sensitive, goal-directed efficient actions are the crucial characteristics of agents. This topic is thoroughly investigated by developmental and comparative psychologists to understand how an observer is able to differentiate agentive entities from inanimate objects, but it can be also related to the term of autonomous intelligent agency used in cybernetics. Agency can also imply the sense of agency, that is the feeling of ownership of control.Emergent interactive agency defines Bandura's view of agencies, where human agency can be exercised through direct personal agency. Bandura formulates his view of agency as a socio-cognitive one, where people are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating, and engage in self-reflection, and are not just reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by external events. People have the power to influence their own actions to produce certain results. The capacity to exercise control over one’s thought processes, motivation, affect, and action operates through mechanisms of personal agency. Such agencies are emergent and interactive, apply perspectives of social cognition, and make causal contributions to its own motivations and actions using ‘reciprocal causation’.