Bounded Agency in Professional Lives

Abstract

This chapter aims to create an interdisciplinary space for the exploration of human agency. Three dimensions associated with structuration, internal-external control and reproduction-transformation are connected in the conceptualisation of bounded agency as a socially embedded, active and potentially transformative process. Expressions of bounded agency are as representative of the distal effects of socioeconomic environments and cultural landscapes as they are reflective of individual capabilities and the proximal influences of workplace, family and community. Furthermore, expressions of agency in professional practice depend fundamentally on the forms of knowledge which practitioners continuously develop and put to work in practice, building on personal histories that provide a platform for the ways in which they come to know, make sense of and act upon what they encounter in workplaces and in their wider professional lives. Dimensions of bounded agency in professional life and professional learning are explored through examples of two contrasting occupational fields, the first exemplifying regulated public sector professional practice and the second exemplifying freelance or contingent work contexts. In professional learning and development, practitioners are generally disposed to learn new capabilities that coincide with their own workplace and wider life goals. Yet agency is bounded in occupational fields that are highly differentiated as domains for agentic expression, not least because of fundamental differences in the knowledge frameworks that underpin the directing of work and the ways in which judgement is exercised in evaluating the scope and limits of agentic action.