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.

Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations

Abstract: This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as 'heroes' of national development or 'victims' of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on a fluid theory of class, we investigate how contract domestic workers are involved in multiple class processes that allow them to produce, appropriate and distribute surplus labour in innovative ways. We also discuss the activities of the Asian Migrant Centre, a non-governmental organization working with domestic workers in Hong Kong, whose efforts to inspire the entrepreneurial aspirations of these women reflect the importance of recognizing migrant workers' multiple economic identities. This analysis has implications for how we imagine the agency of contract wo...

Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: a visual typology of European news

Abstract: In this paper, we analyse how news images of the 2015 Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ visualise refugees and how, in so doing, they mobilise various forms of moral responsibility in ‘our’ mediated public l...

Leaders in Context: Postpositivist Approaches to Understanding Educational Leadership:

Abstract: Leadership is one social scientific field that has escaped the ubiquitous "paradigm wars." Leadership theorists have always attached great, perhaps exaggerated, significance to the agency of leaders. Traditional research methodologies (e.g., questionnaire surveys) normally associated with positivist approaches remain theorists' predominant modes of inquiry. Such methods, however, pay insufficient attention to the role played by institutional contexts in the definition and structuring of human agency. Two alternative methodologies that acknowledge the importance of context in the social construction of leaders and leadership systems are ethnography and biography. Each provides a better way for dealing with followers' implicit theories than mainstream conceptions of leadership. This article outlines the purposes of both modes of inquiry, discusses the problems and possibilities inherent in each, and provides illustrative examples of their advantages for theory building.

Relational agency Relational sociology, agency and interaction

Abstract: This article explores how the concept of agency in social theory changes when it is conceptualized as a relational rather than an individual phenomenon. It begins with a critique of the structure/agency debate, particularly of how this emerges in the critical realist approach to agency typified by Margaret Archer. It is argued that this approach, and the critical realist version of relational sociology that has grown from it, reify social relations as a third entity to which agents have a cognitive, reflexive relation, playing down the importance of interaction. This upholds the Western moral and political view of agents as autonomous, independent, and reflexive individuals. Instead, the article considers agency from a different theoretical tradition in relational sociology in which agents are always located in manifold social relations. From this, an understanding is created of agents as interactants, ones who are interdependent, vulnerable, intermittently reflexive, possessors of capacities that can onl...