Abstract
Recent theorising of children’s agency has focused on relational approaches. Critical realism can provide additional theoretical reinforcement as it demands a focus on relatively enduring patterns of disadvantage and potential powers. Participatory research with children and young people confirms the relevance of Archer’s conception of influence achieved by Selves, Social Actors, and Primary and Corporate Agents. In moments, children within organised collectivities set agendas and shape some circumstances that affect others. When modified by generation-sensitive insights, Archer’s framework may provide understandings of children’s individual and collective agency. These insights might also strengthen critical realist understandings of children and childhood.
Highlights
Recent theorising of children’s agency has focused on relational approaches
Raithelhuber (2016) referring to Larkins (2014), suggests there is a tendency for agency to be ascribed to children without an adequate explanation of its meaning, and influence is demanded for children without indicating how this might operate
Childhood studies authors inspired by Giddens tend, to ignore his analysis of the contingent and situated interaction of structure and agency in social relations, choosing to focus on either structure or agency in a way that reinforces a sense of dualism, they ‘either totalise, globalise and universalise structure or individualise, localise, and particularise agency’. (Oswell, 2013: 63–64)
Summary
Recent theorising of children’s agency has focused on relational approaches. Critical realism can provide additional theoretical reinforcement as it demands a focus on relatively enduring patterns of disadvantage and potential powers. Relational approaches are proposed, which conceive of agency as a social (Esser, 2016) or collective achievement (Oswell, 2013), because a course of action can only be implemented (and changes in social contexts potentially achieved) through dispersed networks or assemblages of human and nonhuman actors (Oswell, 2016) or people, things and process (Raithelhuber, 2016) This can result in there being no distinction between structure and agency collapsing. Whereas for Giddens (1984: 377), ‘Rule-resource sets, implicated in the institutional articulation of social systems’ are structures, for Esser (2016: 15) ‘Rules and regulations ... may work as agents’. Esser (2016: 8) suggests that avoiding duality thinking, relational theories make visible the social by revealing ‘the materiality and messiness of agency as well as its intersectionality’. Roets et al (2013) suggest moving towards a lifeworld orientation, to focusing attention on systems as well as individual and social interactions
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