Agency (philosophy)

About: Agency (philosophy) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10461 publications have been published within this topic receiving 350831 citations. The topic is also known as: Thought & Human agency.

An ‘untied’ research agenda for family migration: loosening the ‘shackles’ of the past

Abstract: This paper focuses on recent methodological and theoretical developments associated with studies of long‐distance family migration. The starting point for the discussion is that previous quantitative‐based studies have over‐privileged economic‐related outcomes, and masked the underlying social and cultural decision‐making processes of family migrants. Emphasising the perceived merits of qualitative frameworks to tease out the ‘non‐economic’ dimensions of family migration, the paper identifies two issues of concern. First, some current under‐researched themes of family migration are illuminated, and an unfolding research agenda for qualitative studies of family migration is outlined. It is contended that this provides a useful entree to future research activities. Second, and with this in mind, the paper stresses the need for more sophisticated analyses of the human agency of family migrants. Therefore, and building upon Halfacree’s thesis of the intentional/unintentional agency of family migrants, an adap...

Lessons from the Virtual Agora Project: The Effects of Agency, Identity, Information, and Deliberation on Political Knowledge

Abstract: A key impetus toward increasingly widespread use of deliberation has been the claim that deliberation helps educate citizens about political issues. Past research has confirmed that people learn in deliberative contexts. This research, however, has not been careful to separate the effects of informative readings or other information sources from the effects of discussion. Knowledge of the exact mechanism of learning is key to determining how best to design for learning. In addition, past research has not examined what individual-level factors affect deliberative learning. These factors must be examined to address concerns about possible inequality in deliberation and may suggest ways to increase equality. This paper introduces a theory of political agency that suggests possible factors for explaining learning in deliberative contexts, including political reflectiveness and conceptions of citizen identity. The paper tests a statistical model that explains learning with the agency variables, socioeconomic factors, and experimental conditions—including a no-discussion condition. The model is tested with data from preand postsurveys of a representative sample of 568 Pittsburgh residents who came to a one-day deliberation experiment. Analysis proceeds with exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, HLM, and OLS with group-robust pvalues. We find, overall, that discussion has no effect on knowledge above the effect of reading and contemplating—a finding with important deliberative design implications. Deliberation remains crucial as a motivator. Discussions do prompt learning in people with certain citizen identities, though not on average more than those merely contemplating the topic. Finally, results show that socioeconomic characteristics play an important role in learning, but one that is partly counteracted by the agency variables. Interventions to reduce inequality are suggested. Agency theory may be a valuable theoretical framework for deliberation research generally.

Aspects of the Client's Conscious Control of the Psychotherapeutic Process

Abstract: An analysis is made of the opening moments of dialogue between and a client and her therapist in the light of the client's commentary given during an Interpersonal Process Recall interview about the moments These moments are drawn from a study of 14 clients' reports on their experiences of therapy, thus particularizing the general understanding derived in the larger project This passage of dialogue was chosen because the client's commentary revealed that, in the brief space of time involved, she had exerted control in terms of the three main relationships as experienced by all clients in the larger study: the relationship with the self, the therapist, and the therapist's techniques Such control is understood to be an expression of clients' reflexivity, defined as self-awareness and agency within that self-awareness The understanding that there is an agential involvement in reflexivity is based on both the participants' reports and the author's examination of his own consciousness The study is discussed in terms of clients' covert experience of therapy and ways of gaining greater access to the unspoken in order to facilitate the working alliance

Social Enterprise Emergence from Social Movement Activism: The Fairphone Case

Abstract: textEffectuation theory invests agency - intention and purposeful enactment - for new venture creation in the entrepreneurial actor(s). Based on the results of a 15-month in-depth longitudinal case study of Amsterdam-based social enterprise Fairphone, we argue that effectual entrepreneurial agency is co-constituted by distributed agency, the proactive conferral of material resources and legitimacy to an eventual entrepreneur by heterogeneous actors external to the new venture. We show how in the context of social movement activism, an effectual network pre-committed resources to an inchoate social enterprise to produce a material artefact because it embodied the moral values of network members. We develop a model of social enterprise emergence based on these findings. We theorize the role of material artefacts in effectuation theory and suggest that, in the case, the artefact served as a boundary object, present in multiple social words and triggering commitment from actors not governed by hierarchical arrangements.