1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.
The overall concept of agency has existed since the Enlightenment where there was debate over whether human freedom was expressed through instrumental rationality or moral and norm-based action.
[3] These definitions of agency remained mostly unquestioned until the nineteenth century, when philosophers began arguing that the choices humans make are dictated by forces beyond their control.
[3] For example, Karl Marx argued that in modern society, people were controlled by the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that man made choices based on his own selfish desires, or the "will to power" and, famously, Paul Ricœur added Freud – as a third member of the "school of suspicion" – who accounted for the unconscious determinants of human behavior.
[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein's talk of rule-following and private language arguments in his Philosophical Investigations has also made its way into the discussion of agency, in the work of Charles Taylor for example.
[5] Agency has also been defined in the American Journal of Sociology as a temporally embedded process that encompasses three different constitutive elements: iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation.
Seizing the moment, when the "looseness" of such constraints allows, enables users to express what Gibson calls "colloquial agency".
Janet Metcalfe and her colleagues have identified other possible heuristics, or rules of thumb that people use to make judgments of agency.
[11] From an evolutionary perspective, the illusion of agency would be beneficial in allowing social animals to ultimately predict the actions of others.
Under other conditions, cooperation between two subjects with a mutual feeling of control is what James M. Dow, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hendrix College, defines as "joint agency.