Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency

Sociological Theory 25 (2):170-191 (2007)
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Abstract

The term " agency " is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal foci--the actor's engaged response to situational circumstances--implicate different forms of agency. This article offers a theoretical model involving four analytical types of agency that are often conflated across treatments of the topic. Each mode of agency overlaps with established social psychological literatures, most notably about the self, enabling scholars to anchor overly abstract treatments of agency within established research literatures.

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References found in this work

Outline of a Theory of Practice.Pierre Bourdieu - 1972 - Human Studies 4 (3):273-278.
Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.Erving Goffman - 1979 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 (4):601-602.
Being human: the problem of agency.Margaret Scotford Archer - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The philosophy of the present.George Herbert Mead - 1932 - Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books. Edited by Arthur Edward Murphy.

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