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.

Women Directors on Corporate Boards: A Review and Research Agenda

Abstract: Manuscript Type: Conceptual (Review) Research Question/Issue: This review examines how gender diversity on corporate boards influences corporate governance outcomes that in turn impact performance. We describe extant research on theoretical perspectives, characteristics and impact of women directors on corporate boards (WOCB) at micro, meso and macro levels: individual, board, firm and industry/environment. Research Finding/Insights: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review of WOCBs, incorporating and integrating research from over 400 publications in psychology, sociology, leadership, gender, finance, management, law, corporate governance and entrepreneurship domains. In addition, we organized our findings to provide a new lens enabling the field to be readily examined by level and by theoretical perspective. The review indicates that WOCB research is about improving corporate governance through better use of the whole talent pool’s capital, as well as about building more inclusive and fairer business institutions that better reflect their present generation stakeholders. Theoretical/Academic Implications: With only one in ten papers addressing theoretical development, the predominant perspectives are human and social capital theories and gender schema at individual level; social identity, token and social networks theories at board level; resource dependency, institution and agency theories at firm level, and institutional, critical and political theories at environmental level. We provide a short synopsis of findings at each level, and conclude with an outline of fruitful directions for future research. Practitioner/Policy Implications: There are increasing pressures for WOCBs, from diverse stakeholders such as the European Commission, national governments, politicians, employer lobby groups, shareholders, Fortune and FTSE rankings, best places for women to work lists as well as expectations from highly qualified women who are likely to leave if they see no women board members. Rationales generally draw on the business case, however the moral justice case is also used by those who seek a fairer gender balance in all aspects of society. From our review, the ‘Impact’ section charts the effect of WOCB at all four levels of analysis.

Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory

Abstract: People are inescapably shaped by the culture in which they live, while culture itself is made and remade by people. Human beings in their daily lives feel a genuine freedom of thought and belief, yet this is unavoidably constrained by cultural limitations--such as those imposed by the language spoken, the knowledge developed and the information available at any time. In this book, Margaret Archer provides an analysis of the nature and stringency of cultural constraints, and the conditions and degrees of cultural freedom, and offers a radical new explanation of the tension between them. She suggests that the "problem of culture and agency" directly parallels the "problem of structure and agency," and that both problems can be solved by using the same analytical framework. She therefore paves the way toward the theoretical unification of the structural and cultural fields.

Cultures and Selves: A Cycle of Mutual Constitution

Abstract: The study of culture and self casts psychology’s understanding of the self, identity, or agency as central to the analysis and interpretation of behavior and demonstrates that cultures and selves define and build upon each other in an ongoing cycle of mutual constitution. In a selective review of theoretical and empirical work, we define self and what the self does, define culture and how it constitutes the self (and vice versa), define independence and interdependence and determine how they shape psychological functioning, and examine the continuing challenges and controversies in the study of culture and self. We propose that a self is the ‘‘me’’ at the center of experience—a continually developing sense of awareness and agency that guides actions and takes shape as the individual, both brain and body, becomes attuned to various environments. Selves incorporate the patterning of their various environments and thus confer particular and culture-specific form and function to the psychological processes they organize (e.g., attention, perception, cognition, emotion, motivation, interpersonal relationship, group). In turn, as selves engage with their sociocultural contexts, they reinforce and sometimes change the ideas, practices, and institutions of these environments.

The Economics of Agency.

Abstract: : The agency relationship is a pervasive fact of economic life. Even in the limited sense in which the concept has traditionally been understood in ordinary and in legal discourse, the principal-agent relation is a phenomenon of significant scope and economic magnitude. But economic theory has recently recognized that analogous interactions are virtually universal in the economy, at least as one significant component of almost all transactions. The common element is the presence of two individuals. One (the agent) must choose an action from a number of alternative possibilities. The action affects the welfare of both the agent and another person, the principal. In this study of organizational efficiency this report discusses the following topics: (1) The Two Types--Hidden Action and Hidden Information;(2) Example--Public Utility Rate Setting; (3) Multiple Principles; (4) The Hidden-Action Model; (5) Monitoring; (6) Multiple Agents and Repeated Relations; (7) An Evaluation of Agency Theory.

Enacting Integrated Information Technology: A Human Agency Perspective

Abstract: Recent perspectives on organizational change have emphasized human agency, more than technology or structure, to explain empirical outcomes resulting from the use of information technologies in organizations. Yet, newer technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems continue to be associated with the agenda of organizational transformation, largely because they are assumed to constrain human action. We report an interpretive case study of an ERP system after its implementation in a large government agency. Despite the transformation agenda accompanying the new system, users initially chose to avoid using it as much as possible (inertia) and later to work around system constraints in unintended ways (reinvention). We explain the change in enactments with the concept of improvised learning, which was motivated by social influence from project leaders, "power users," and peers. Our results are consistent with arguments regarding the enactment of information technology in organizations and with temporal views of human agency. We conclude that an integrated technology like ERP, which potentially represents a "hard" constraint on human agency, can be resisted and reinvented in use.