Agency

The modern notion of democracy is founded on the concept of free will or the idea that individuals are ultimately the arbiters of their own destiny. Human agency is very similar to the notion of free will in that agency may be understood as the capacity to exercise creative control over individual-level thoughts and actions. In keeping with the ideals of Western democracy, there is a widespread assumption that humans are imbued with free will and, as such, routinely exercise agency within the domain of their personal choices as well as in the social and political realm.

Nevertheless, social scientists have demonstrated that unique individual attributes are contingent on extensive social organization of the psyche. In other words, the process of developing basic human potentialities (e.g., walking, talking, learning, loving) is predicated on an elaborate socialization regime: Nurturing healthy, happy humans can be brought about only through a long-term process of intensive social training. This has led numerous social scientists to conclude that, because “individuality” is irretrievably dependent on elaborate social indoctrination regimes, there is in reality no such thing as agency; that is, if every key attribute on which unique human [Page 15]personalities are based emerges only as a result of social indoctrination, then one can argue that all human creativity and potential are largely (or even wholly) determined by social influences.

Nevertheless, Timothy McGettigan argued that, despite the inescapable impact of societal influences on human psychosocial development, it remains possible to locate agency within the coercive context of social reality. McGettigan argued that actors demonstrate a capacity for agency when, on perceiving evidence that is in discord with their understanding of reality, they refashion their comprehension of reality to facilitate an understanding of that discordant evidence. Acquiring knowledge that might conflict with views that are already present in the minds of agents can be accomplished by participation in communication environments, through solitary reflection, or through various encounters with the empirical world (e.g., having an apple fall on one's head). The impetus (communication, reflection, or encounters with the physical universe) that impels actors to redefine reality is not as critical to the process of generating agency as is the ability of actors to perceive phenomena of which they had no prior conception and then to reconstruct their view of reality to accommodate their newly realized perceptions.

The existence of a capacity for redefining reality establishes that individuals who are situated within rigid contexts of social control can emancipate themselves sufficiently to think and act in a self-determined manner, that is, to exercise agency. Of course, the range of such emancipation is substantially constrained. Once again, just because individuals can conjure novel ideas does not mean that oppressive ideological superstructures will blow away like dust in the wind. However, the capacity for redefining reality implies not only that agents may produce novel ideas but also that agents can translate their groundbreaking ideas into action—and, in so doing, initiate social change at the individual, organizational, and sometimes even societal levels.