Agentic Capabilities Research Articles

Taking psychology seriously: a self-determination theory perspective on Robert Sugden’s opportunity criterion

ABSTRACT Robert Sugden (2018. The Community of Advantage: A Behavioural Economist’s Defence of the Market. Oxford University Press) offers an alternative account for normative economics grounded in the view that it is in each individual’s interest to have more opportunity rather than less, irrespective of whether their decisions reveal well-ordered preferences. Our paper characterizes Sugden’s proposal as a step in the right direction, but as insufficient. His opportunity criterion does not go far enough in taking insights from psychology seriously. Sugden defends an idea of agency understood as a person’s subjective sense of being in control of her actions. To realize this sense of being in control, we argue that a focus on opportunity-only is problematic; people also need agentic capabilities. We use self-determination theory (SDT) to develop a subjective account of agency that is grounded in psychological science.

Endogenous preferences: a challenge to constitutional political economy’s normative foundation?

AbstractThis paper starts with the observation from behavioral economics that preferences are endogenous, i.e., they are unstable, context-dependent, and open to processes of adaptation. It then asks whether welfare analysis and normative economics are still possible in a world populated by people with endogenous preferences. In particular, it looks at recent proposals by Viktor Vanberg and Carl Christian von Weizsäcker. In highlighting an institutional perspective, both can be seen as proponents of modern ordoliberalism and both claim that their approaches can deal with the issue of endogenous preferences in a more coherent way than approaches that remain within the mind frame of traditional welfare economics. The paper argues that in mainly highlighting the importance of information provision for individual autonomy, Vanberg’s approach of constitutional political economy (CPE) underestimates the complexity of preference endogeneity. While von Weizsäcker’s approach is a refinement of the CPE framework, the paper argues that it focuses too much on external structural conditions (viz., competition among interpersonal influences) and neglects a discussion of the necessary internal agentic capabilities for individual autonomy. The paper argues that a more intricate discussion of decision autonomy leads to a twin concern for outcome and process freedom in normative economics. Outcome freedom allows individuals to satisfy their evolving preferences and process freedom enables them to critically reflect upon their preferences and surroundings.

A neglected topos in behavioural normative economics: the opportunity and process aspect of freedom

AbstractRobert Sugden has advanced various critiques of behavioural welfare economics, offering the notion of opportunity as an alternative. We agree with much of Sugden's critique but argue that his approach would benefit from a broadening of the informational base beyond opportunities to include people's concern for decision processes. We follow Amartya Sen in arguing that the process through which choices are made (process freedom) is something individuals care about beyond the availability of choice options (opportunity freedom) as they value a sense of agency. We argue that individuals’ agentic capabilities are crucial for people's process freedom and hence for their sense of agency. In the final section of the paper, we sketch the institutional implications of our argument, i.e. what a joint consideration of opportunities and agentic capabilities means for behavioural public policy.

Reducing inequalities through strengths-based co-creation: indigenous students’ capabilities and transformative service mediator practices

PurposeService marketers are increasingly aware of inequalities triggered by service systems and the need to prioritize practical strategies for reducing inequalities. A priority area for the Australian Government is reducing university education inequities for Indigenous Australians. This paper aims to examine how Indigenous Australian university students build and leverage their capabilities and strengths, harnessing service providers’ efforts towards enhancing participation (and completion) in university education – an essential transformative outcome for reducing inequalities.Design/methodology/approachA three-stage qualitative research process explored student retention/completion and capability building among a sample of Indigenous Australian university students, typically under-represented in the higher education sector.FindingsApplying a manual thematic analysis, the findings reveal Indigenous students’ value co-creating capabilities (summarized in three dimensions) harness multi-actor processes extending beyond the service provider. Five dimensions summarize the service provider’s transformative service activities that strengthen capabilities for Indigenous Australian university students. Networks of place (a structured Indigenous Centre); processes (university systems); and people (social support), including peer-to-peer networks, are important service assemblages.Practical implicationsThe authors present implications for supporting Indigenous students in persisting with and completing higher education. More broadly, the authors provide recommendations for service marketers to resolve barriers to service equality and enhance strengths-based approaches to value co-creation.Originality/valueUnderpinned by a strengths-based approach, the authors contribute towards an agenda of sustainable transformative services. Although considerable research reviews the experiences of Indigenous students, little research has taken a transformative service research perspective. Addressing this, the authors propose a conceptual framework linking consumers’ agentic capabilities with transformative service mediator practices.

The Paradox of Strategizing: Embracing Managerial Agency without Throttling it

Strategizing implies making agentic choices in some middle ground between un-analyzable free will and agency-denying determinism. Paradoxically, neither view can capture the strategist’s situation or process. So how are strategy theorists approach agency? In our opening sections, we review the mainstream literature and find seven main arguments or tracks. Five, by improving methodological accuracy and reducing variance, effectively throttle or deny the strategist’s agency. The two other tracks offer agency an ontological or epistemological place in the analysis but underplay the synthetic nature of the strategist’s practice. In our final sections, we treat strategizing as handling the practice-based constraints to the strategist’s agency. A positivist approach makes little sense here for ex definition strategy supposes a finite option-space into which the strategist’s agency is ‘thrown’. Practitioners focus on their choices within this space rather than on the application of a generalized ‘theory of strategy’. There is little new here; but analyzing it means moving away from causal modeling and towards exploring the options remaining after all reasonable determining causes have been identified - leaving the strategist with the under-determined middle ground s/he ‘synthesizes’ from incommensurable theories and empirically justified heuristics. Concluding, we propose a novel track of theorizing for those strategists seeking to engage their agentic capabilities rather than theorizing about agency as a component of a rigorous academic model.

'This is not what I want for my children': agency and parenting in Danish asylum centres.

BackgroundChildren of asylum-seeking families constitute a particularly vulnerable group, and there is growing interest in understanding how asylum-seeking parents can be supported to safeguard the health, wellbeing and growth of their children. In this study, we examine the capabilities of asylum-seeking parents to act on the support and advice provided by child health nurses in Danish asylum centres.MethodsWe draw on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 asylum-seeking families (corresponding to 15 parents) living in two asylum centres run by the Danish Red Cross.ResultsThe findings illustrate that asylum-seeking parents’ agentic capabilities to take care of their children are tightly constrained by their housing constrictions and living conditions, insufficient money allowances, regular relocations and juridical status as asylum-seekers. These physical and organizational structures and the pervasive uncertainty related to being asylum-seekers inhibited parents from acting on advice from child health nurses, and from providing their children with a safe, healthy and stable environment.ConclusionsAsylum-seeking parents face the task of taking care of their children within particular physical, organizational and juridical structures, which tightly constrain their ability to parent their children well, or to follow advice provided by child health nurses.

Agentic capabilities as predictors of psychological capital, job performance, and social capital over time

AbstractThe present two‐wave study, conducted on 456 employees, investigates the mediating role of psychological capital (PsyCap) in the relationships between agentic capabilities (i.e., forethought, self‐regulation, and self‐reflection) and three outcomes, namely job performance, rated by supervisors, and two forms of social capital, namely vertical social capital (i.e., the perceptions of relationship with the supervisor), and horizontal social capital (i.e., the perceptions of positive relationships with colleagues). The results confirmed the positive prediction of PsyCap by agentic capabilities, emphasizing its agentic nature. Moreover, PsyCap fully mediated the positive effect of agentic capabilities on the three outcomes (i.e., job performance, positive perceptions of supervisors, and positive perceptions of colleagues), revealing its key role in translating basic cognitive capabilities related to human agency in job performance and both vertical and horizontal social capital. Future research directions and practical implications are discussed.

Scaffolding athlete learning in preparation for competition: what matters

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to advance the notion of scaffolding in coaching as a socio-pedagogic activity through exploring the “doing” of coaching during a competition preparation period. Using the method of critical companionship, the analysis draws on a storied representation of a coach’s practice. Findings conceptualise scaffolding as a transformative process of continuous building and enacting of both coach and athlete’s agentic capabilities to enhance learning. Within this framework, the coach had to understand the athlete and read the cultural context for scaffolding to occur within an appropriately constructed zone of proximal development (ZPD). This involved building a ZPD and scaffolding that developed athlete agency as a learner while maintaining respect and security, leading to the enhancement of the coach’s pedagogical and social agency. These findings advance the notion of scaffolding through merging the pedagogical and social, providing a framework for coach and athlete’s agentic learning and development.

The limits of opportunity-only: context-dependence and agency in behavioral welfare economics

ABSTRACT What should be the ‘informational base’ of welfare economics if one takes the insights from behavioral economics seriously? Sugden proposes individuals’ sets of opportunities. This paper discusses his opportunity criterion and argues that it largely neglects intricate problems of context-dependence and personal agency. We contrast Sugden’s approach with Buchanan’s understanding of choice, which highlights the importance of agentic capabilities to navigate choice sets, particularly in situations where individuals face subtle interdependences between preference formation processes and their situational or social environment. This paper advocates that the informational base of welfare economics may need to go beyond opportunities if it is to command general assent among individuals who have an interest in being sovereign ‘authors of their own lives’. We argue that economists who take individuals interests seriously should not only consider the size of opportunity sets but also individuals’ sense of personal agency when comparing alternative social states.

"I Just Want Some Clear Answers": Challenges and Tactics Adopted by Migrants in Denmark When Accessing Health Risk Information about COVID-19.

Health risk communication plays a crucial role in preventing the spread of infectious disease outbreaks such as the current coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Yet, migrants are far too often forgotten in health risk communication responses. We investigate the challenges and efforts made by migrants in Denmark—in the initial months of the pandemic—to access information about COVID-19. We draw on 18 semi-structured interviews conducted in May and June 2020. All interviews are thematically coded and analyzed. Our analysis reveals that many of the migrants faced several challenges, including accessing information in a language understandable to them and navigating constant streams of official news flows issuing instructions about which actions to take. However, we also note that the participating migrants found numerous creative ways to address some of these challenges, often aided by digital tools, helping them access crucial health and risk information. This paper highlights that migrants constitute an underserved group in times of crises. They are vulnerable to getting left behind in pandemic communication responses. However, we also identify key protective factors, social resources, and agentic capabilities, which help them cope with health and risk information deficits. National governments need to take heed of these findings to inform future pandemic responses.

Medical students’ experiences of a longitudinal integrated clerkship: a threshold concepts analysis

ABSTRACT Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships (LIC) are known to provide several pedagogical advantages including transformational educational experiences. The study explored the learning experience of undergraduate medical students who undertook a rural LIC in a Scottish primary care setting. This paper presents an analysis of the transformative role of LIC placements using the Threshold Concept (TC) theory. This qualitative study gathered students’ perceptions of their LIC experience longitudinally through written and audio diaries over a period of 1–2 months. The issues narrated in diaries were followed-up in individual semi-structured interviews. Transcripts were thematically analysed to identify key characteristics of TCs using a criterion-based approach. Data from 12 audio and nine written diaries, and five interviews led to identification of three inter-connected themes associated with the LIC year: professional identity formation, becoming an agentic learner and comfort with uncertainty. These appeared transformative in nature and resembled threshold concepts in their character and effect. An active and legitimate role in the healthcare team, longitudinality and transdisciplinary learning during LIC placements were contributary towards navigating these thresholds. The LIC exposure provided transformative learning experiences, and a stable environment that facilitated acquisition of specific TCs in the medical students’ journey towards becoming a doctor. LIC affordances fostered a transformed view of self, which was more confident in dealing with uncertainty, comfortable in the emerging professional identity, and described having enhanced agentic capabilities.

How Digital Technologies Modify The Work Characteristics: A Preliminary Study.

New technologies with unprecedented agentic capabilities (i.e., action selection, protocol development) are now introduced in organizations such as Big Data, 3D printing or artificial intelligence. Because they are endowed with novel capabilities that might compete with human agency, they might disrupt the way employees work. Based on the work design model, this study aims to examine their introduction in the daily work activities and the consequent perceptions of the work characteristics. Building on Murray's et al. (2020) proposal, we offer a classification of the digital technologies to conceptualize their relationship with the work characteristics. To explore the changes induced by two digital technologies (i.e., drones, robotic automation process), we interviewed 3 types of employees (i.e., experts, managers, users) from an organization which has started a digitalization process and we conducted a thematic analysis. Our analysis revealed three main themes that are discussed: A technological theme (arresting, assisting), a work characteristic theme and a theme about the human-technology relationship (agentic, non-agentic). Results showed that employee autonomy has not been reduced when digital technologies executed repetitive and unmotivated tasks and that jobs in the digital work context may be marked by a high level of knowledge characteristics. Moreover, technologies with agentic capabilities may be perceived as a non-human agent. Theoretical contributions for the work design model are then examined.

The Work Agentic Capabilities (WAC) Questionnaire: Validation of a New Measure

Agentic capabilities refer to the basic capabilities of mind that, according to social cognitive theory, allow people to proactively influence their functioning and external context. This study presents a new scale, namely the Work Agentic Capabilities (WAC) questionnaire, that consists of 28 items and measures forethought capability, self-regulation capability, self-reflection capability and vicarious capability in the organizational context. Accordingly, an exploratory (N = 290) and a confirmatory factor analysis (N = 300) demonstrated a four-factor structure. Agentic capabilities were positively correlated with psychological capital and its dimensions i.e., self-efficacy, hope, optimism and resiliency), positive job attitudes (work engagement and job satisfaction), proactive organizational behaviours (job crafting and organizational citizenship behaviours), perceived job performance, and promotion prospects. Finally, we discuss meaningful differences in the mean values of agentic capabilities associated with sociodemographic and organizational variables. Results suggest that the WAC questionnaire can be reliably used to measure agentic capabilities.

School caringscapes: Understanding how time and space shape refugee and immigrant adolescents’ caring practices and wellbeing in Danish schools

Schools are increasingly cited as spaces of support for learners facing adversity. It is therefore not surprising that recent migration flows have contributed to a mushrooming of school-focused policies and interventions looking to promote the mental health and wellbeing of refugee and immigrant learners. In response to a research focus on how teachers, schools and school-based interventions care for the wellbeing of vulnerable leaners, this article explores ethnographically how school-going refugee and immigrant adolescents develop their own practices of care for self and others. It draws on fieldwork carried out between December 2018 and June 2019 and includes participant observations in two Danish preparatory classes for newcomers and in-depth interviews with 13 learners and five teachers. Drawing on the concepts of caringscapes and carescapes, our analysis not only reveals how newcomers form significant caring practices, and co-produce spaces that foster collective wellbeing, but highlights the temporally and spatially bounded nature of their care. We found their caring practices to be oriented in relation to biographical time, highlighting how newcomers enrol past experiences, present needs and future aspirations in their caring. We also noted that newcomers’ caring practices are contingent on the character of their school environments, including teacher practices, and wider policy contexts around refugee and immigrant children's education and residence. We conclude that efforts to understand and promote refugee and immigrant learners’ wellbeing in school contexts must take heed of the temporally and spatially bounded nature of their agentic capabilities to care for themselves and their peers.

“After All, I am a Doctor”: The Role of Values in the Construction of Agency of Fertility Doctors

In this article, we offer an analysis of the role of professional values in the agency of professional actors, which are recognized as key agents of institutional change. We explore this question by looking specifically at the role of French fertility doctors in relation to the debates around the reform of assisted medical procreation in France which is up for revision since 2018. Relying on an inductive study of forty-seven interviews, complemented by analysis of treatises written and published by doctors, public interviews in the press, and observations of meetings and conferences of practitioners publicly committed to promoting a change, we explore how the confrontation between their professional values and the realities of their practices created specific agentic capabilities and normative beliefs that can explain the strong implication of these doctors in institutional change. In doing so, we show how these agentic capabilities lay at the core of their professional identity and interact with professional interests such as competition and business. Our contributions demonstrate that an institutionalist perspective on professional agency offers the opportunity to re-establish the importance of normative elements in the agency of professional actors beyond the focus on jurisdictional conflict and competition.

When the Client Is a Former Auditor: Auditees' Expert Knowledge and Social Capital as Threats to Staff Auditors' Operational Independence

ABSTRACTAuditees can play an active role in influencing staff auditors' professional judgment and skepticism. Yet, although it constitutes one of the main threats to auditor independence, very little is known about the means and extent of auditees' power during the audit engagement. To address this knowledge gap, our study focuses on a specific category of auditees, namely, auditees who have worked as auditors in large accounting firms. We interviewed 36 of these auditees and triangulated our findings with 11 interviews conducted with auditors. At the theoretical level, we conceptualize auditees' influence over auditors as intentional and active through the notion of “social power.” Overall, our analysis shows that the efficacy of auditees' power during the engagement materializes through the mobilization of two main power resources developed during their time at the firms: (i) expert knowledge of auditing techniques and (ii) social capital. On the one hand, relying on their cognitive authority, auditees' employ three different power strategies to constrain staff auditors' operational independence: stage‐setting, teaching, and questioning. On the other hand, auditees' social capital can support the use of two additional strategies: attracting and monitoring. Our triangulation analysis confirms our findings and suggests that auditors may be aware of the threats to independence that auditee expertise and social capital pose. By focusing on auditees' agentic capabilities—that is, individuals' capabilities to consciously exert influence over the course of events—we reinterpret the pressures exerted by clients on auditors as the product of strategic actions and discuss substantive consequences for independence risk.

Upward Mobility of Students from Lower-educated Families in Stratified Educational Systems: The Role of Social Capital and Work Habits.

In tracked and highly stratified educational systems, where educational reproduction is particularly strong, the chances of students to achieve more education than their parents did are truncated. Little is known, however, what may help students raised in lower-educated families to become upwardly mobile at the transition to upper-secondary education. In tracked educational systems, this transition is decisive for ultimate educational attainment across the life course. The study addresses this research gap by examining whether quality of social relationships (i.e., social capital) among students, parents, and teachers matters for student and teacher assessment of students' agentic capabilities (i.e., work habits) at age 15. If so, the question is whether these assessments help students become enrolled in high-status upper-secondary school tracks at age 18, thus achieving educational upward mobility. The analyses are based on 401 students from two cohorts in the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, interviewed at the ages of 15 (T1) and 18 (T2) (60.35% females, Mage 15 = 15.2, SDage 15 = 0.2; 58.35% older cohort), including data collected by questionnaire from primary caregivers and teachers at student age of 15. The students come from families where highest parental education attainment is below the high-status academic or vocational baccalaureate in upper-secondary education. They may thus experience the opportunity to gain access to these high-status tracks at the transition to upper-secondary education. A structural equation model reveals the role of student assessment of their agentic capabilities and teacher assessment of these competencies in mediating the relation of social capital accrued at home and at school to educational upward mobility. This novel evidence on mechanisms of social advancement may be prone to inform interventions helping students from less-educated families to succeed in tracked and stratified educational systems.

The socio-material self-care practices of children living with hemophilia or juvenile idiopathic arthritis in Denmark.

Growing up with a chronic disease can take its toll on children and their families, and if poorly managed, be disruptive to children's long-term health and wellbeing. While parents and health service providers do play a central role in disease management, children's own self-care practices often go unnoticed. In existing literature, children's self-care practices only tend to emerge in research with adolescents who "transition" from pediatric to adult clinical care services. This study was conducted in December 2017 to May 2018 and explores ethnographically the self-care practices of children affected by hemophilia or juvenile idiopathic arthritis in Denmark, with a particular interest in how social relations and material context affect their pre-transition self-care practices. A total number of 16 children and adolescents aged 7-17 years and 39 family members participated in the study. We find that the children participate in three socio-material self-care practices. Firstly, the children actively engage in home treatment of their bodies by changing the setup of medical equipment and incorporating everyday materialities to make treatment more comfortable. Secondly, they play games imitating their own treatment, using medical equipment on dolls or teddy bears to seek out experience and learning. Thirdly, they seek a sense of normality by tactically hiding material signifiers of their disease in online and offline encounters with peers. Our findings suggest that children living with a chronic disease establish and participate in a range of different self-care practices, and actively mobilize people and things around them to achieve precisely this. We conclude that these socio-material self-care practices are central to helping children make sense of living with chronic disease, both to maintain health and wellbeing, but also to gain greater independence. We encourage others to recognize children's pre-transition self-care practices, and the implications of these agentic capabilities.

Redefining #YourAverageMuslim woman: Muslim female digital activism on social media

Orientalist discourses have largely shaped how Muslim women have come to be represented in western visual media as oppressed, subjugated or foreign. However, with the advent of social media platforms, Muslim women are utilizing social media spaces to rearticulate the controlling images promulgated through orientalist narratives. This article examines the complex relationship visual media shares with Muslim women and demonstrates that the lens of orientalism continues to structure the imaginaries that shape visual representations of Muslim women in art, news and film. This article addresses how visual platforms and social media spaces such as YouTube are being utilized by Muslim women to undertake digital activism that seeks to subvert essentialist narratives. At the centre of this discussion is YouTuber Dina Tokio’s (2017) documentary, titled ‘#YourAverageMuslim’, which tackles western preconceived notions, and instead offers a redefined version of the ‘Muslim woman’ predicated on resisting three narratives: (1) Muslim-Woman-As-Oppressed, (2) Muslim-Woman-As-Subjugated and (3) Muslim-Woman-As-Foreign-Other. This documentary clearly demonstrates how Muslim women are using social media platforms in specific ways to shape the discourses around Muslim women. In doing so they are demonstrating their agentic capabilities, taking control of their representations, and speaking for themselves instead of being spoken for by others.

Design Engagements at the Margins of the Global South: De-Centering the “Expert” Within Me

Conceiving everyone as a potential designer and believing in local peoples’ informed understandings and agentic capabilities in addressing local problems, my design research journey was committed to opening up avenues for sustained transformations in the underserved spaces of rural eastern India. In my design engagements, we (community members and I) contributed in three design projects, namely design for community development (DfCD), information design for development (IDfD), and design for grassroots innovation (DfGD). In my design journey, I sincerely questioned/challenged my presumptions and design approaches as well as reflexively reoriented myself to make the design processes culturally meaningful and contextually appropriate. Being constantly cognizant about minute traces of superiority (and sense of indispensability) within me, being willing to challenge, modify, and rediscover myself continually, as well as privileging and situating local and indigenous perspectives and knowledge at the center of design processes, characterize some of the key learning of my design journey.