Theory Of Human Agency Research Articles

A Phenomenological Study of Street Vending in Downtown Area, Tacloban City

This study investigates street vendors' lived experiences in downtown Tacloban City, Philippines, focusing on their economic contributions, challenges, and coping mechanisms in the informal sector. Street vendors play an important role in urban economies by making goods and services more accessible and affordable, as well as providing livelihood opportunities for people with few job options. Despite their economic importance, street vendors frequently face legal and social challenges, such as harassment and a lack of recognition from the government. Using a phenomenological approach, the study seeks to fill a gap in the literature on the financial practices and capital management techniques of street vendors in Tacloban City. The study looks into the factors that influence the prevalence of street vending, its impact on vendors' livelihoods and well-being, and the strategies vendors use to overcome daily operational challenges. The findings are expected to guide policy interventions aimed at improving the quality of life and economic resilience of street vendors. Amartya Sen's Human Agency Theory, Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, and Hernando de Soto's Informal Economy Theory all serve as foundations for the analysis. These frameworks provide a thorough understanding of the agency, motivation, and economic dynamics of street vendors. The study's findings are intended to benefit street vendors, policymakers, community initiatives, and future research by fostering a more inclusive and supportive environment for urban informal economies.

Stuffing the refugee education pipeline: the integration process and the exclusion of refugees from knowledge production in a Western destination country

The number of forcibly displaced people, including refugees, has been increasing exponentially over the last few decades. Refugees settled in Western destination countries face several challenges in successfully accessing and participating in higher education and in becoming knowledge producers. This is in sharp contrast to uncritical assumptions that refugees settled in these countries are better off in terms of pursing higher education. To shed more light on this issue, I aim to address the research question ‘How does the integration process in a Western destination country contribute to the exclusion of refugees from knowledge production?’ The article uses an education pipeline analogy and human agency theory as the theoretical framework. I conduct narrative interviews with six refugees who planned to pursue higher education but could not realize their plans in Norway. The findings indicate that the refugee education pipeline is broken and stuffed with various restrictive factors that weaken the refugees’ agency to make informed decisions. These factors included a long waiting time for settlement, withholding relevant information about higher education, demotivating and misplaced advice about higher education and language training programmes for non-academic purposes. The article ends with a conclusion and several implications.

The positive mutually reinforcing dynamics of career-adaptive attributes in career human agency

Background: Empirical research on career-adaptive attributes that elucidate the dynamic interplay between resources of career self-reactiveness and career self-reflectiveness in career human agency theory (CHAT) is scant.Objectives: The objective of the study was to assess the simultaneous interplay between constructs of career self-reactiveness (career adaptability, psychological capital, career agility) and constructs of career self-reflectiveness (career resilience and career satisfaction).Methods: The cross-sectional canonical correlational design of the study involved a random sample of black African employees (N = 412) in a South African public service government organisation.Results: Adaptive readiness, goal-directed adaptability and career forethought and intentionality in goal achievement emerged as four common synthetic themes that illustrated the mutually reinforcing dynamics among the study variables.Conclusion: The reciprocal associations among the study variables offer promising support for career counselling interventions that apply the CHAT. The findings may guide the use of career assessments for career-adaptive behaviours that help cultivate career human agency.Contribution: The study contributed to career development in the African context by enriching understanding of the role of individuals’ adaptive readiness, goal-directed adaptability, career forethought and career intentionality in agentic career goal achievement.

Ecological correlates of adolescents' sense of agency: Are there differences for boys and girls?

Although the literature recognizes the relevance of sense of agency during adolescence, little is known about which factors can promotes or undermines this belief. Identifying the factors that determine adolescents' sense of agency is a challenging task that must consider influences assessed at both the individual and structural levels for a more comprehensive understanding. Guided by assumptions of the ecological model of human development, this study analyzes the contribution of adolescents' age, cumulative family disadvantage, peer relationships, student-teacher ratio, and school's goal structure to adolescents' sense of agency and explore if these links vary according to their sex. The sample comprised 1189 adolescents (15–18 years) and 18 school heads. Family disadvantage and peer alienation were associated with a lower sense of agency regardless of sex. Trustful peer relationships were linked to a stronger sense of agency for boys. Schools with a high student-teacher ratio and a strong focus on performance can undermine girls' sense of agency. Regardless of sex, adolescents who attended schools with lower performance and higher mastery goals showed a stronger sense of agency than adolescents who attended schools with both low performance and mastery. Findings are discussed based on ecological approach of human agency and attachment theory.

Learning and agency for sustainability transformations: building on Bandura’s theory of human agency

How to secure a sustainable future is currently one of the key challenges across society. Bandura’s theory of human agency provides important insights into this question by recognising the role of individual, proxy and collective agency in initiating action and change. In this article, we conceptualise sustainability agency and discuss psychological features and competencies that are relevant for supporting agency in sustainability education. Agency may manifest in different forms and contexts: countless actions in individual lives, communities, and local, national and global scenes can contribute to sustainability. This range of opportunities to be engaged in sustainability transformations can be better acknowledged in sustainability education in formal, non-formal and informal learning settings by broadening and clarifying the targets and indicators of successful sustainability education. Consequently, sustainability education and related participation in advancing sustainability can become more inclusive and meaningful for actors with diverse backgrounds.

Leadership behaviors and human agency in the valley of despair: A meta-framework for organizational change implementation

For organizational leaders, implementing change in a workplace means influencing employees to do something new or behave differently. For employees, implementing a change at work requires detaching from familiar routines and social systems, learning and practicing the change, and imagining a future in which the change is valued by the organization. As they apply their agency to implement change, employees may experience loss, uncertainty, and frustration that manifests as despair, which can jeopardize the change process and its outcomes. We assemble a meta-theoretical framework using human agency theory, the Valley of Despair model of organizational change, and Full-Range Leadership Theory to explore ways that leaders' behaviors relate to employees' agentic orientations and behaviors during the implementation phase of the organizational change process. Taking both organizational change leaders' and employees' perspectives into account, the theory derived from our meta-framework argues that leaders' behaviors can shape employees' agency and their behaviors during the implementation stage of change in two important ways: 1) certain leader behaviors are likely to prime agentic orientations that facilitate changing, and 2) certain leader behaviors may help to mitigate employees' despair, enabling the firm to derive value from employees' change implementation behaviors.

Max Weber and Charles Taylor: On normative aspects of a theory of human action

This paper seeks to make two distinctive sets of contributions through a supplementary reinterpretation of Max Weber in the light of Charles Taylor’s expressivist-hermeneutical theory of human agency. First, it offers a reinterpretation of Weber’s work. Focussing on the concept of stance, the paper highlights that Weber’s theorising on values and their relation to cognition, action and identity is less underpinned by subjectivism, representationalism, emotivism and decisionism than is typically thought. Instead, Weber sets values within a non-naturalist dimension where agents find their bearings and are constituted as such. In this dimension, orientation to meaning takes place; identity, action and thought are constituted; and normative experiences (such as freedom, or responsibility) are made possible. Weber recognised that this non-naturalist dimension has variegated modes, but seemingly studied them in their purest and most logical form (the ‘ideal type’), hence his focus on explicit belief systems and world-images. Second, there is a prospective supplementation of Weber’s theory through Taylor’s notion of expression. For Taylor, we take a stance and orient ourselves expressively through the domain of strongly valued meanings. The notions of strong evaluation and articulation prove central to understanding embodied, symbolic and representational meaning-orientation in the non-naturalist dimensions of values. This supplementary reading places Weber as a central figure in current American, British and French debates about, respectively, the normative nature of human agency; the question of culture, meaning and their different forms and modes of operation; and the question of how to examine identity-formation.

Motivational determinism

AbstractPhysical determinism is a metaphysical thesis about the natural world whose consequences for freedom and moral responsibility have been widely discussed. In this paper, I articulate a different form of determinism, motivational determinism, which claims that all intentional action is causally determined by the prior motivational state of the agent. Motivational determinism was defended in a simple form by Hume, but has been neglected in recent philosophical literature. I show that there are important reasons that support the plausibility of MD. I then compare MD with libertarian and physical deterministic theories of agency and note that MD has various attractive features. I show that MD is much more threatening to moral responsibility than physical determinism. I conclude that MD is an interesting theory of human agency that deserves wide attention.

Being ‘in Christ’ in the Letters of Paul.

Being ‘in Christ’ in the Letters of Paul.

Applying career human agency theory to practice

This article elaborates the emerging career human agency theory and its applicability to career psychology practice. Using Bandura’s human agency theory as a foundation, career human agency theory is a meta-theory that integrates key tenets from major theories in vocational and career psychology. It presents an endeavour of theoretical integration to conceive and understand career issues and vocational behaviours. The article provides a brief overview of career human agency theory, indicating its postmodern constructivist and constructionist worldview in conceptualizing life-career phenomena, while integrating life and career experiences into a dynamic and coherent whole. To this end, the four pillar theoretical principles and constructs of career human agency theory are reviewed, namely, career intentionality, career forethought, career self-reactiveness, and career self-reflectiveness. Furthermore, the article considers and explains the usefulness of the four constructs as they are applied to professional helping and self-helping processes that improve and enhance the vocational wellness of individuals, connecting career human agency theory to practice. In doing so, the article concludes with a case study illustration to demonstrate how these career human agency theory constructs and their related tenets and ideas can inform and guide career development practice and career counselling interventions, utilizing and strengthening agentic functioning in individuals’ worklife wellbeing.

The Career Human Agency Theory

The authors propose a constructivist theory of career human agency to integrate and update the existing career theoretical models to better address the current postmodern zeitgeist. The career human agency theory (CHAT) represents a metatheory of career psychology guided by the principles of Bandura’s human agency framework and informs career development practice and counseling interventions. CHAT promotes the enactment of personal, proxy, and collective agency in the face of uncertainty and adversity. This article describes 4 pillar principles of career agency and provides concrete examples for career counseling application.

Toward Agentic HRD: A Translational Model of Albert Bandura’s Human Agency Theory

The ProblemAlbert Bandura has refined a theory of human agency with three modes and four core properties within social cognitive theory. Human agency plays a critical role in one’s adaptation, self-development, and self-renewal. Despite its relevance to human resource development (HRD), human agency theory has not been explored or effectively utilized in HRD research and practice.The SolutionFollowing Bandura’s human agency theory, a translational and implementational model for HRD was proposed. First, the model integrated the four core properties of human agency (intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness) into a model by altering the sequence to align with major HRD processes. Second, it synthesized triadic reciprocal determinism with the four core properties of human agency by placing the agent at the center of the model. Third, it is an open systems model that describes reciprocal determinism between the agent and the environment at micro, meso, and macro levels, indicating the dynamics of personal, proxy, and collective agency.The StakeholdersThe model will be useful for career practitioners, coaches, organization development consultants, and other HRD professionals who deliver interventions. HRD researchers and theorists may find it worthwhile to test and validate the model. In addition, regardless of disciplines, researchers, and practitioners who follow social cognitive theory may find some insights from the translational model.

Regulating Risk Culture in Banks

The paper analyzes the role of financial regulation in facilitating the development of organizational norms to enhance risk culture in banking institutions. Specifically, it examines the regulatory responses and industry-led initiatives taken since the financial crisis of 2007-08 to address weaknesses in bank risk culture. The paper suggests that shortcomings in risk culture — particularly as understood through the lens of human agency theory — in large financial institutions are the result of collective agency problems. The paper argues that regulation has a role to play in addressing collective agency problems but that regulators should be selective in what tools they use to enhance risk culture in banks with consideration given to the regulation of remuneration and trusted financial products. It further suggests that to address collective agency problems in large financial institutions policymakers should consider the utility of senior managers’ liability regime to incentivize senior officers and directors to be more proactive and aware of misconduct and other behavior that results in agency costs for the firm and society. The paper concludes, however, that financial institutions themselves are best placed to channel the collective actions of individuals to improve governance and operations in a way that benefits overall firm performance and which mitigates socially costly behavior.

Temporal enactment of resettled refugees' ICT‐mediated information practices

Abstract“In this paper, we explain how resettled refugees use information and communication technology (ICT) to respond to their changed circumstances and, in doing so, enhance their well‐being and effective participation in a new society. Focusing on three modes of ICT‐mediated information practices (ie, orienting, instrumental, and expressive), we identify eight patterns of ICT use: learning about a new environment, keeping informed, transacting online, communicating with others, managing everyday life, sustaining support networks, maintaining transnational ties, and expressing cultural identity. Further, we draw on a temporal theory of human agency to explain how current dilemmas and contingencies, cultural identities and connections to the past, and future expectations and aspirations shape resettled refugees' enactment of these patterns of ICT‐mediated information practices. We show that, as resettled refugees move between multiple and overlapping temporal‐relational contexts, ICT use makes a difference to managing their bifurcated lives.”

Anthropocene Knowledge Practices in McKenzie Wark’s <i>Molecular Red</i> and Kim Stanley Robinson’s <i>Aurora</i>

<p class="p1">Through a close reading of McKenzie Wark’s theoretical treatise <em>Molecular Red</em> (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel <em>Aurora</em> (2015), this essay examines how Anthropocene knowledge practices challenge our conceptions of human agency in provocative and potentially productive ways. For example, our knowledge of climate science arises through global material infrastructures. As material components of Anthropocene knowledge practices, these infrastructures reveal the material labors and cyborg structures by means of which our knowledge is produced. Wark sees the heterogenous materiality of Anthropocene knowledge practices as evidence for the value of ‘low theories’ based on a ‘labor point of view.’ At the same time, Anthropocene knowledge practices reveal ‘eco-logical’ complexities and fundamental recognitions of the ‘intra-action’ of entangled matter. These complexities produce very estranged views of human agency. Robinson’s novel highlights the eco-logical implications of contemporary knowledge practices by imagining an interstellar ship that must function as a completely artificial ecosystem for a 170-year voyage to another solar system. The significance of knowledge practices and eco-logical complexity is most evident when failures or crises arise, and <em>Aurora</em> tells the story of many such failures. However, I argue that Robinson’s novel and Wark’s ‘low theory’ ultimately function as hopeful accounts of Anthropocene knowledge practices. Among other things, these practices show the material importance of storytelling and point the way toward more complexly realist theories of human agency.

Reconciling faith and reason: T. H. Green’s theory of human agency

ABSTRACTThe Victorian age was a period in which Christian Orthodoxy was undermined by new and emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. The commonly-held view amongst historians is that the intellectual life in the era was composed of two hostile camps; those who defended Christian Orthodoxy and those who championed the new sciences. The received view is that, when faced by the new fields of reasoned inquiry, Christianity’s prominence within British intellectual life and discourse went into terminal decline. The intention of this article is to demonstrate that there was a middle ground between the two camps. In particular, this article aims to demonstrate that attempts were made to reconcile Christianity with the findings of the emerging forms of reasoned inquiry. This will be achieved through providing an examination of T. H. Green’s theory of Human Agency. Green was one of the most prominent philosophers of the Victorian age. Through his theory of human agency, Green consciously engaged in the debate that existed between theistic Christianity and the emerging forms of reason inquiry of the time.

Graduate STEM-Based Agriculture Education and Women Agriculturalists: An Agency Perspective

In this paper, we explored the academic and professional aspirations, experiences, and perspectives of 11 women pursuing graduate degrees based in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields within research-intensive agriculture colleges at three land grant research universities in the United States (U.S.). Using principles drawn from the theories of human agency (Bandura, 1989, 2001; Emirbayer &amp; Mische, 1998; Locke, 1978; Lukes, 1973; Sewell, 1992; Terosky, Campbell, &amp; O’Meara, 2014) and gendered organizations (Acker, 1990, 2012) as our conceptual guide, we explored the conditions and contexts that influence the academic experiences and professional trajectories of emergent women agriculturalists who are enrolled in STEM-based graduate programs. We were particularly attentive to how such experiences and trajectories aligned with agricultural environments that have been shown to be masculine (i.e., large-scale farming and agribusiness, STEM-based agricultural research, Extension). The study developed a deeper understanding of the institutionalized conditions that influence the participation and leadership of women in solving the agricultural problems that confront society and the human condition. Implications for graduate STEM-based agriculture education are discussed and recommendations for both practice and future research are proposed.

Skills needed in supply chain-human agency and social capital analysis in third party logistics

PurposeA shortage of skills is recognized as a major source of risk in supply chain networks. This study uses two independent organizational theories to explain how to build applicable skills for continuous availability of appropriate supply chain talents. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrated framework that links human agency theory, social capital theory and supply chain skill.Design/methodology/approachThis framework is analyzed in third party logistics (3PL) organizations by confirmatory factor analysis and tested using a survey. After pre-testing by six academics and six practitioners, and following the total design method, the data were collected from 183 3PL organizations in India. Data were checked to ensure no non-response bias. Research hypotheses were tested using WarpPLS-structural equation modeling.FindingsA primary finding offers guidance to 3PL managers. Their driving role and mediating role of access to information and access to resources facilitate building supply chain skill. Leaders who invest in library, acquiring e-resources, offer financial support and create trust among employees are enablers of building supply chain skill.Originality/valueThis study classified 14 supply chain skills into three categories as: managerial skill, quantitative skill and supply chain core skill. The study could be extended to similar companies in other developing countries.

Can children break the cycle of disadvantage? Structure and agency in the transmission of education across generations

Research has shown that parents tend to pass educational advantage or disadvantage on to their children. However, little is known about the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of education involves children’s agency. In this study we drew from two traditions in sociological and social psychological theorizing—the theory of cultural and social reproduction and the theory of human agency—to examine whether agency influences children’s educational performance, and if so, whether this influence can be observed among children across social classes. We used data from the Spanish sample of the Program for International Student Assessment (N = 25,003 15-year-olds). Results indicate that the level of child agency was weakly positively related to social class, that child agency impacted on a child’s educational performance, and that the positive effect of agency on educational performance did not vary by social class. This suggests that strategies to enhance disadvantaged children’s agency may prove useful in reducing social gradients in educational performance. More generally, our findings may ignite a debate about the role that social structure and human agency play in shaping social inequality and mobility.

Agency and coping strategies for ethnic and gendered minorities at work

This study examines the comparative workplace experiences of twenty Muslim professional women from the United Kingdom and Australia classified as minorities in terms of their ethnic, religious, gender and migration status. Diversity as exclusion remains highly topical in extant diversity studies. For instance, Muslim migrants have often been stereotyped as sexually constrained, victimized, ignorant, poor, uneducated and tradition-bound. Muslim women may be highly discouraged if Western workplaces are not conducive to their social and cultural needs. By using human agency and coping theory, this study investigates the coping strategies of Muslim professional women, how they adapt, how they react and reflect on stressful workplace events such as discriminatory behaviour. Human agency theory provides a basis by which to explore agent responses to organisational narratives in this study. Overall, this study finds that active coping and planning to deal with stressful events is important for ethnic minorities and that emotion-focused coping is used when less active planning is prevalent. The study lends support to the triple jeopardy effects of race-related ethnicity, work practices and gender. The findings pose challenges for Western feminist theory in terms of the interface between gender and religion and the freedom of expression of individual agents in the workplace.