Journal ArticleDOI
Agency as a red herring in social theory
Steven Loyal,Barry Barnes +1 more
TLDR
In this paper, the authors argue that there is no fact of the matter, no evidence, however tentative or questionable, that will serve adequately to identify actions "chosen" or "determined" for the purposes of sociological theory.Abstract:
The central argument of this article is that there is no fact of the matter, no evidence, however tentative or questionable, that will serve adequately to identify actions “chosen” or “determined” for the purposes of sociological theory. This argument will be developed with reference to the two theorists of the greatest importance in advocating the sociological value of the concept of agency: Talcott Parsons, with his “voluntaristic theory of action,” set the scene for the whole agency and structure debate in modern sociology, and Anthony Giddens, in his theory of structuration, provides the most comprehensive recent account. Both theorists put forward grounds and justifications for their use of the concepts of “choice” and “agency,” but it will be argued here that in the last analysis, none of them has any sociological merit.read more
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What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work
TL;DR: The concept of agency has become widely used in learning research, especially in studies addressing professional and workplace learning, but also in policy discussion on how to promote individually meaningful careers and life-courses amid rapid changes in working life as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency*
Steven Hitlin,Glen H. Elder +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors take a social behaviorist approach to the concept of agency and suggest that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept.
Book
The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a social ontology and social structure for ontology-based social networks, where ontology is used to represent the social structure of a social network.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reconciling Archer and Bourdieu in an Emergentist Theory of Action
TL;DR: This article argued that the weaknesses in Bourdieu's theory of action can be resolved by a reasonable reinterpretation of the habitus that makes it consistent with the emergentist theory and creates space for human choices as well as social influences on our behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
Should Consumer Citizens Escape the Market
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use a sociological perspective to question the validity of critiques of consumer culture and examine what it may mean to "escape" from consumerism, using an example from a marginalized African community deprived of the means of consumption.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The Structure of Social Action
TL;DR: A notable attempt to make a substantial contribution to this problem appears in the volume under consideration as mentioned in this paper, where one of the central objects of Professor Parsons' study is to demonstrate the validity epistemologically of a general theoretical system-a science.
Book
Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action
TL;DR: In this paper, a brief digression on Attribution on Individualism in Social Theory Transcending Individualism is discussed, along with a discussion of agency, responsibility and new human biotechnologies.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Theory of Structuration
TL;DR: Anthony Giddens's The Constitution of Society as mentioned in this paper is an "outline of the theory of structuration", which is the most extensive statement so far of Gaddens's theoretical approach.