Clark Matthew G. - Constraints of agency : explorations of theory in everyday life

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Roger Smith 1

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Keywords

Agency is a word with multiple meanings. As it certainly does not ambiguously denote a psychological category, I begin with clarifications.

The word agent in English has been in use since the seventeenth century to identify a factor or power held to cause a change. For agency, the Oxford dictionary cites Darwin, who wrote about the pollination of flowers requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to another. Agency denotes capacity and power attributed to matter (as in chemical reagent), to institutions or social organizations with the power to act on behalf of people (like the Central Intelligence Agency), and to people individually (as in the agent of her own destruction). It has also been common to refer to Gods agency or the agency of spirits. Historically, the opposite of agent was patient, and this is a reminder of the active/passive distinction of the premodern ontology to which the language of agency is heir.

The multiplicity of references to agents of different kinds persists in everyday speech about causation. The language of agency permits descriptions of naturalistic and non-naturalistic, material and mental, individual and social causes to exist alongside and in interaction with each other. In everyday usage, it is possible to refer to everything from car brakes to rental company to driver error to intention to kill as the principal agent of an accident. However, there has been a historical shift, so that there is a modern emphasis on using the word agency to denote a moral or political, that is to say, distinctively human category. As a result, speakers now might reserve the attribution of agency to people or institutions in a car accident (to continue with the example) and distinguish other factors as contributing causes. This modern usage describes the agents as individual people or groups of people who are said to have the power to be the cause of events, and said to have the power of self-direction . Agency has become linked to notions of the autonomous self and to the dignity or status accorded to a free agent. Thus, it is a notion important to moral and political issues. Feminists, for example, place great weight on women acquiring agency and in critiquing the circumstances in which this is constrained. Indeed, much of the experienced meaning of agency derives from its opposition to the notion of constraint. Beyond this, the notion of agency also has an influential place in humanist and existential philosophy, with expression in psychology, where reference to agency denotes something like a reference to freedom as a defining condition of being human.

It is important to be aware of the range of linguistic usage. It is possible to refer both to material or spiritual things as agents and to people, distinctively, as agents. Before the twentieth century, language sometimes described people as agents, but in doing so it ordinarily attributed the agency to the will, to the soul, or to reason, rather than to a psychological subject or a self. In a parallel way, some recent writers attribute agency to the body, to the unconscious, or to the brain. All the same, contemporary writers commonly attribute agency to people, or to the self (as in the statement, I did this), and they attach a special value to it. These multiple usages are rather confusing for analysis, if unexceptional in everyday speech.

In the light of these comments, I stress one point. Reference to agency in twentieth or twenty-first century psychology, as in the human sciences generally, may simultaneously invoke what are generally thought of as causal processes and what are thought of as free actions. At first glance, as a result, it would seem as if psychologists are deeply equivocal about accepting or denying free will . I suggest that actually there is no deep-lying confusion behind this equivocation, if that it be; rather, there is something special in the projects of psychology, namely, their ability to provide description and analysis appropriate for understanding people, as opposed to understanding brains (in terms of deterministic causal processes) on the one hand, and juridical, moral, or political subjects (with imputed absolute freedom of action) on the other hand.

The modern notion of the individual person as agent first developed in legal, political and theological contexts. The history is intimately connected to the developing notion of a self. Reference to human agency denoted, and still denotes, action originated by individual legal, moral, and political subjects, or by institutions viewed as analogous to individual subjects, acting without special or noteworthy constraint. This has often been called free agency. The Oxford dictionary, in this context, cites Coleridges political demand that the State shall leave the largest portion of personal free agency to each of its citizens, that is compatible with the free agency of all. It is the normative practices of politics and morality that have made it important to distinguish human agents from other agents. Insofar as psychologists have been drawn into discussions of human agency, they have taken part in these normative practices.

In consequence, it makes no sense to ask for a non-evaluative account of a persons agency. Discussion of agency, in the last analysis, involves questions about the relation of human subjects, intentions, and evaluations, and of the language and culture which are their expression, to the causal material world that is the subject of the natural sciences. This is why agency is a problematic category for natural scientists who think that science excludes evaluative judgments.

When psychologists refer to agency, they use a psychosocial category. Just as there is no non-evaluative use of the word agency, the word has no psychological meaning independent of social content. The literature about agency, as a psychosocial category, therefore inevitably takes positions on the long-standing question of the relation between psychological and social forms of explanation and the institutionalization of those forms in separate psychological science and social sciences. The discipline of social psychology clearly faces these matters most directly (and there has even been a psychological social psychology and a sociological social psychology; Good

While ordinary people, and often enough psychologists too, might now say that a person is an agent (and explain the agency, say, by reference to intelligence or cognitive capacities), the social scientist understands agency as attributed to a person (or institutions or things). In the language of social science, agency is a status not a state (Barnes ). Applying this lesson in psychology, we can say that when psychologists talk about agency, they utilize a category with social content and take part in the process of social and political ascription of status to people. But it muddling matter. This is because reference to agency as a status ascription (or attribution) persists alongside and interacts with the older usage in which reference to an agent denoted a capacity or power (whether material, mental or spiritual). Moreover, there are, of course, psychologists with religious beliefs or who uphold a humanist philosophical anthropology, for whom agency is indeed a real state, a state valued and thought essential to being fully human.