Situated Agency

Situated agency has to do with the relationship between conduct and context involving meaningful human actions. Central to giving an explanatory account of human behavior and social practices, whether explicitly or implicitly, is a conception of the relationship between concepts and practices, meaning and action. When we view people as situated agents, we attribute to them the ability to reason and act in novel ways despite the background that they necessarily inherit, which provides a context for their creative innovations. Situated agents always set out against a background of some social discourse or tradition but because they are not wholly constructed by it, they can create traditions and practices through local reasoning and modify the very background that influences them. To attribute situated agency to people is thus to regard them as capable of using and modifying their social context (e.g., language, discourse, traditions) according to the meanings they hold. Regarding people as situated agents allows us to properly take into account how people's intentionality is the source of their conduct.

The idea of situated agency is most commonly discussed in relation to postfoundational debates about subjectivity, particularly on the issue of how we should understand meanings to be derived. As a reaction to the primacy of the subject in the modern era, postfoundationalism repudiates the autonomous view of the self according to which individuals would be able, at least in principle, to have experiences, adopt beliefs, exercise reason, and perform acts independent of any contexts. Postfoundationalists typically reject autonomy on acceptance of the fact that individuals necessarily experience the world in ways that reflect the influence upon them of traditions, ideologies, or discourses. The rejection of autonomy leads many postfoundationalists to focus exclusively on the construction of subject identities toward an oversocialized concept of humans as passive constructs of social forces when this need not be so. The suggestion that individuals are always situated within social contexts leaves open the possibility that they are situated agents who can innovate against the background of such context. Moreover, situated agency entails only the ability to creatively transform an inherited tradition, language, or discourse; it does not entail the ability to transcend social context.

Situated agency thus stands as a critique of both the traditional autonomous view of the self and contrary approaches that see subject identities as almost wholly constructed. The idea that people are shaped by circumstances and institutions has ceased to be controversial, but to say that everything we do can be explained by social forces, places, and functions is by no means obvious and no more compelling than the view of autonomous individuals prior to any social context. Individuals are never merely the passive supports of prescribed roles or social processes; nor can human actions be explained solely in causal, functional, or mechanical terms. Social actors must be understood, at least in part, as intentional subjects [Page 873]acting in response to an understood situation and whose actions must also be seen in terms of a symbolic or meaningful character for the agents themselves. The concept of situated agency is thus useful for analyzing or explaining a social practice, where we should want to elucidate the ways in which people respond to dilemmas creatively from within their existing beliefs.

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