Human Agency

The concept of human agency refers to the ability of humans to make conscious choices and communicate these to other people. It stands in contrast to the simplistic concept of free will, which argues that our choices are not the process of causal chains of social interaction and ultimately are undetermined by such relations. Views that center on human agency make no such claims. Instead, it openly acknowledges that humans make decisions and impress them on the world only through some form of interaction with a larger collective. This has several ethical implications. First, human agency relies on personal efficacy. Only if humans see that their actions show results and render the desired effects will they continue to consciously be part of a larger social collective. Second, the degree of efficacy and interaction then depends on the ways in which human subjectivity is modified by power. Human agency is formed only within social interaction that is the result of power discourses. For example, an activist for an oppressed political minority party in a country dominated by a dictatorial regime probably has fewer possibilities to voice his or her opinion publicly (and to influence policy) than does the dictator. The activist is part of a hierarchical collective where one voice dominates all others. The activist's power in directly facing the dictator is very limited, and such action might even be life threatening. But in cooperation with other dissidents, and in covert gatherings as well as public ones, the activist might be able to gradually develop a social movement that, through its collective voice and manpower, challenges and upstages the dictator. This exemplary case shows how human agency is placed in a social context and how power mediates the ways in which people communicate and challenge one another. When addressing human agency, social scientists always examine the relationship between individuals and societies and focus on how institutions such as governments mediate the power relations between these entities.

In addition to reflecting on the relationship between individuals and societies as it is controlled by power, the concept of human agency has been debated in the philosophy of science. In particular, it has raised the questions of what the object of scientific inquiry should be and how the scientist should relate to this entity. These relationships can best be addressed by looking at the discipline of geography itself.

The emergence of a debate about the significance of human agency for the discipline of geography can be traced to the popularity of humanistic geography during the 1980s. At that time, a first serious examination of the role of the geographer in the research process occurred. Humanistic geographers spelled out the role of human agency in geography and provided a historical perspective and critique of how the discipline has dealt with this concept. They accused geography of too much focus on objects (inanimate materials) and too little emphasis on subjects (humans and their emotions, motives, and beliefs). The dominating philosophies of science that shaped geographic paradigms of the 20th century—most notably positivism and Marxism—undervalued or left aside the individual and collective power of human agency. Whereas the early human geography of the French school of Paul Vidal de la Blache focused on humans and their active role in transforming their environment within the constraints of nature, this interpretive understanding of people and their interactions with the landscape gave way to scientific inquiry based on positivist methodology. [Page 232]Geographers increasingly adopted a new approach to science that focused on collecting social facts disconnected from individual and collective human consciousness. In many ways, this emulated the data collection process of the scientific method as it was (and still is) dominant in the natural sciences. Following the quantitative revolution of the 1950s, spatial analysis modeled the economic and social patterns created by humans in the natural landscape and paid little attention, if any, to individual human behavior and motivations. Beginning in the 1960s, behavioral geography remedied this problem only partially by focusing on repetitive quantifiable phenomena of human behavior that could be modeled and portrayed in universalizing models. For example, there emerged a larger number of studies in human migration behavior that examined social, economic, and cultural motives of individuals for changing their residences; families, households, and single individuals were asked where and why they moved. Although many of these studies actually involved interviews and large-scale survey research that actively included a population of research subjects, geographers nevertheless neglected to relate the motivations and patterns they observed to the social and political contexts in which they were formed. Statistical analyses summarized people's motivations, but to a large degree the results disregarded how these were formed and in what social context they developed.

...