What is Agency?

Authors: Emirbayer M, Mische A (1998)

This article, seeks to understand what agency, sociologically speaking, means. Usually, the term has been understood in opposition to structure. This paper, on the other hand seeks to study agency as a category of its own, and situate it as a social process embedded temporally.

The paper defines the term as "the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments—the temporal- relational contexts of action—which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations", and goes on to argue for such a definition and elaborate more on it

The paper can be downloaded from: http://moodle.fhs.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/27179/mod_resource/content/0/Emirbayer_Mische_What_is_agency.pdf