Enactment Of Agency Research Articles

Professional Agency, Identity, and Emotions While Leaving One’s Work Organization

This study investigated the enactment of professional agency in an emotionally troubled work context emerging from a conflicted relationship between the professional and the work organization. Narrative interviews with Finnish educators were utilized. The findings indicate that the enactment of agency was in part framed by the educators’ rational interpretations of the relationship between themselves and their employer, plus their work history and future prospects. However, it was simultaneously embedded with contradictory emotions, such as a sense of being undervalued, fear, and a sense of empowerment. Within this framework, multifaceted professional agency was enacted particularly via leaving the organization. This was also a means of upholding one’s professional identity and resisting the organization’s work practices. The paper contributes to the theorizing of professional agency, particularly regarding its emotional dimension, and elaborates the significance of an emotional relationship between professionals and their organizations.
 Keywords: career, educators, emotions, meaningful work, narrative research, professional agency, professional identity

Revealing the hidden agency of children in a clinical setting

Interactions with children in clinical settings are often criticized because parents and medical professionals speak for children rather than to them. Such approaches do not take the agency of children into account. First, to examine how children enact agency in a clinical encounter and draw lessons from this to improve health-care practices for children and, second, to explain how looking at agency might help to move the participation agenda forwards. A qualitative study incorporating a range of methods, including participant observation, interviews and focus group discussions. Three hospitals in the Netherlands. Children with diabetes type 1, between 8 and 12 years (n = 30), parents (n = 22) and medical professionals (n = 16). Children do not simply accept the recurrent health education from medical professionals. Instead, they attribute their own personal meaning to their disease and treatment. Drawing from their years of experience with the disease and health care and the image of a passive and vulnerable child, they actively find ways to balance personal goals with medically defined goals. Efforts to facilitate child participation should be based on insights into the ways in which children enact agency in the clinical encounter. Our data show that children already participate in health care and that their enactment of agency is based on a practical logic. Understanding of children's current participation and agency is needed to more successfully attune their treatment to their daily lives with diabetes. This is crucial for the success of treatment and the well-being of children.

‘I'm going to kill myself if you don't …’: contextual aspects of suicide in Australian Aboriginal communities

Aboriginal suicidal behaviours in remote Australia present as very different phenomena to suicidal behaviours in mainstream Australian society. Multiple suicide threats and behaviours often appear to express ways of executing violence or retaliation, rather than the immediate wish to die. This may be a response to the lack of choices in the face of an historical context of intergenerational trauma, grief and loss. Aboriginal youth are grasping the possibility of death, and the threat of dying, as a violent means to gain control over their lives. This enactment of agency can give instant ‘power’ to those violent and vulnerable enough to use it. Using examples of such a suicidal crisis common within these communities, this paper argues that those who work within Australian Aboriginal communities need to better understand the continuing impacts of colonialism and inter-generational trauma and ‘decolonisation’. Further, the approach taken in providing services to communities may need to be adapted from the mo...

“The Meth Factor”: Group Membership, Information Management, and the Navigation of Stigma

Methamphetamine (or “meth”), a central nervous system stimulant, has been constructed as a dangerous drug with certain and extreme consequences. Incomplete and sometimes inaccurate portrayals, while aimed at preventing the initiation of use, stigmatize those who do use. Using data from in-depth, qualitative interviews with eight Northern Colorado women who are active meth users, this article explores how female meth users navigate this stigma through negotiation of group membership and management of information. The women in this study internalize and challenge the stigma: They identify as meth users and addicts yet view their own practices as distinguishing them from other users; and, they carefully control the extent to which they tell others of their use, even when contradictory to their sense of self and desirable relationships. These findings support the need for increased recognition and further examination of the role and enactment of agency among drug users and other oppressed groups.

Working the Crevices: Granting Students Authority in Authoritarian Schools

Schools are beset with a serious “alienation gap” between teachers and students that is no less a problem than the “achievement gap.” Increasing student voice is thought to be one means to fill the gap, for it activates agency and thereby decreases passivity. The extent of agency ranges from attentive adult listening to strong student leadership. Here we concentrate on distinguishing elements of freedom, power, and authority in the enactment of agency, particularly how these elements can be distributed to students in urban authoritarian schools. In this article, four second-year Teach for America graduate students describe and reflect on their separate initiatives. Following the descriptions, the senior author, in a cross-case analysis, suggests factors associated with successful outcomes—enhanced self-esteem, individual rather than collective pride, careful consideration of the external context, constrained objectives, and the transfer of authority rather than power. We conclude that in troubled, impoverished schools, incremental change in distributing genuine authority is a promising possibility for enhancing school attachment.

Horses, Girls, and Agency: Gender in Play Pedagogy

This is a study of the development of student agency from a gender perspective in a Finnish classroom. Thedata originates from an ethnographic research project in an elementary school classroom engaging in a playpedagogy project called a “playworld.” The article has two purposes. The first is to examine the potential ofimagination and improvised fantasy play in the development of agency. The second is to investigate the role of gender as a social category in shaping the students’ possibilities for agency in the play pedagogical setting. The creative use of imagination is at the center of the playworld pedagogy. However, it has rarely been studied in relation to the potentially uneven or stereotypic consequences of cultural tools, symbols, and categories.The analytical focus is on the gender-related categorization of a ‘horse girl’ and the role it played in the development of the agency of two seven-year-old girls as they participated in the playworld. I have used a multidisciplinary analytical framework to sensitize myself to the data. In the article I combine Vygotsky’s ideas of double stimulation, Sacks’ categorization analysis and, Holzkamp’s concept of action potence. The results show that the playworld pedagogy that explicitly aimed at developing children’s agency and collaboration was strongly gender categorized and thus was constraining for the girls in this study. On the other hand, the girls’ unplanned fantasy play, which took place on the sidelines of the classroom activity, contained important agentive elements. It gave thegirls a sense of agency crucial to their enactment of agency in the wider playworld setting. It is argued that the girls were able to become agentive players in the activity through questioning the gendered categories openly in the classroom.