In line with ecological and person-in-environment perspectives, social work intervenes to change social institutions and systems to enhance the well-being and material circumstances of excluded individuals Adams et al. Social work person-in-environment practice frameworks rest on assumptions that individuals possess human agency.
Consistently with the broad sociological definition of human agency driving this article, social work theories recognise that the environment determines the person but the person determines the environment Brekke, Social work engages at the interacting person and environment dimension and social work's engagement is predicated on human agency.
Given that social work theories and practice frameworks prioritise an individual's capacity for human agency and that social work practitioners are overwhelmingly employed to work with people in direct service provision roles, we could conclude that social work scholarship—as published in contemporary social work journals—focuses on questions of human agency. More specifically, we could expect that social work research examines the human agency of people working with social workers.
Indeed, many of the profession's seminal thinkers not only conclude that social work scholarship focuses on the individual and their human agency, but also assert that contemporary social work scholarship is disproportionately directed towards the individual. A common explanation is that social work's disproportionate focus on the individual is part of the neo-liberal project Hyslop, Gray et al.
This focus on individual action and behaviour, it is argued, glosses over structural and systematic forces where individual problems are embedded Schram, Garrett cites Michael Gove, a leading conservative political figure in the UK, as a high-profile example of the state pushing social work away from a social analysis of disadvantage. Garrett argues that, through political rhetoric and the training of social workers, the state directs social work towards an individual analysis of social problems, whereby social work is pressured to intervene with individuals to change their actions and behaviour as the solution to the problems they experience.
Central to Garrett's thesis is that social work in contemporary British society is too heavily directed, and being further pushed, towards the human agency of social work clients. The casting of social problems as matters of individual behaviour—a focus on the individual—implicitly and explicitly brings questions of human agency to the fore.
In a similar analysis from the USA, Levin et al. With Olson , they argue that organisational pressures and a desire to achieve a professional status mean that social work focuses on micro-based interventions directed at individual behaviour. Indeed, Reisch and Jani suggest that contemporary social work in the USA has moved away from its critical narrative of resistance and challenging the status quo.
Instead, and consistently with the characterisation of neo-liberalism in the UK, they argue that social work has moved towards dominant cultural ideas of the primacy of the individual. Others have outlined contrasting views.
Rather than the individual as the unit of analysis, Parsell, Tomaszewski and Phillips claim that, for political and ideological reasons, social work has deliberately overlooked human agency of social work clients.
Social work is a value-based profession which explicitly advocates for marginalised and excluded groups Healy, The critique of Parsell, Tomaszewski and Phillips assumes that a focus on the agency of individuals experiencing disadvantage, if that agency portrays them negatively, may undermine advocacy efforts to disrupt social oppressions. Consistently with Wacquant's critique of contemporary urban ethnographers who deliberately focus on the positive attributes of the marginalised as a means to highlight their acceptability to the middle class, Parsell, Tomaszewski and Phillips assert that social work scholarship has not sufficiently engaged with the agency of marginalised populations to avoid problematic discourses of the undeserving poor where people are blamed for their poverty.
Martin takes this line of argument further. He asserts that, in their quest to develop sophisticated explanatory theories, social scientists have ignored individuals and not taken account of an individual's assessment of their situation. Instead, social scientists privilege third-person explanations of human action where human agency is discounted Martin, Driven by the theoretical, ideological and practice significance of human agency for social work, this article examines how contemporary social work literature engages with human agency.
Following debate about whether social work either focuses disproportionately on human agency or deliberately avoids it, we draw on a systematic search and synthesis of contemporary social work literature to develop an evidence base for these claims and counter claims. Two research questions are addressed. First, to what extent does contemporary social work literature engage with questions of human agency?
Second, in what ways does contemporary social work literature position human agency? Systematic reviews are powerful resources for researchers and practitioners because they provide a succinct yet comprehensive synthesis of research evidence in particular areas.
Social workers have used systematic reviews to generate diverse evidence about the nature and extent interventions, including: substance disorder treatment Clark et al. Social work also uses systematic reviews to examine how disciplinary journals deal with certain issues, including: prevention Ruth et al.
The content of scholarly social work journals is central to the profession's endeavours to carve out an identity Ruth et al. The stated aim of many disciplinary journals is to disseminate knowledge for the purposes of informing practice.
With practice frameworks of people interacting in their environment social work has much to contribute about human agency of excluded groups. Whether, and how, the profession deals with human agency demonstrates an understanding of the positioning of problems that individuals experience, while also identifying the position of social work in addressing the problems. By systematically searching and synthesising articles published in social work journals—identifying what is highlighted and what is overlooked—we can gain insights into the normative positions and public image advocated by social work Grise-Owens, ; Ruth et al.
To facilitate our systematic search and synthesis, we drew on the published literature to identify salient features of human agency. Unlike concepts used in the majority of social work systematic searches, agency is an ambiguous Loyal and Barnes, and multidimensional concept Hitlin and Johnson, Emirbayer and Mische developed an influential sociological model of agency that moves beyond classic ideas of human action as habitual and embedded within past experiences.
Their model of agency recognises that people do not only act out of habit and routine, rather agency is oriented towards future possibilities and an individual's capacity to reflect upon and evaluate their present situation. Adopting Emirbayer and Mische's model, we add to it with Hitlin and Johnson to integrate aspirations and optimism in achieving life goals as meaningful components of human agency. These sociological models of human agency are consistent with social work practice principles which position individuals with the capacity to determine their life outcome Reisch and Jani, Social work researchers have drawn on social models of human agency to locate both social workers and client's capacity for projective and creative action in a context mediated by available resources and social conditions Goh, ; Smith, Individual action is always imbued with structure, but social action is never completely determined or structured Emirbayer and Mische, This is similar to bounded agency—the capacity of an individual to influence their life course Shanahan et al.
The socially embedded notion of agency fits well with contemporary psychological theories that reject ideas of free will and describe human action as a dynamic interplay of a person influenced by their environment. It is the capacity to exercise agency that is central to self-determination and a core aspect of developing a sense of identity Ryan and Deci, This socially located characterisation of human agency drives the empirical research presented in this article.
To identify and examine how social work academic literature deals with human agency, we systematically searched, screened and coded the content of forty-eight social work journals published over a five-year period from 1 January through 31 December We selected the forty-eight journals based on Hodge and Lacasse's ranking of social work journal quality. Hodge and Lacasse identified eighty active social work discipline journals; using the Google Scholar h-index, they ranked journals from 1 to Initially, we planned to search the top-fifty-ranked journals, but our search identified that two top-fifty-ranked journals ceased publication by Using this search string, in late and early , we searched the forty-eight journals across the title, abstract and keywords search fields within our five-year window.
In practice, an article would be identified if it contained at least one search term in either its title, abstract or keywords. Our search terms are not exhaustive, but they do enable examination of social work literature to identify the use of human agency defined as a construct that positions people as not entirely subject to structure—or made implicitly invisible by structure.
Agency instead recognises an individual's capacity for evaluation, projection, reason, self-determination and action. Of the forty-eight journals searched Table 1 , forty-three were searched using Scopus, three were searched in the ProQuest database platform and two journals were not indexed in academic database platforms and were thus searched using directed Google Scholar. Table 1 Systematic search strategy. There were no limits placed on the amount of article content; articles containing one sentence about human agency or large sections of content were included in screening and coding.
In conjunction with researchers experienced in systematic reviews, we then screened the title and abstract of each article according to the following criteria: Is the document unique not a duplicate? Does the document refer to human agency? Is the article about human agency of check-box, one or both : Social work or social worker practitioners. Qualitative notes describing the article, with a focus on content dealing with human agency and methodology, were identified and reported Hsieh and Shannon, Addressing research question 2, the remainder of our article draws on the content analysis of the articles that included human agency of clients or non-social worker groups to tease out how the social work literature positions human agency.
The articles include the with a sole focus on client agency and the articles that included clients and social workers. We do not analyse content regarding social worker agency that was captured in the articles that included clients and social workers or the that focused on human agency of only social workers see Marston and McDonald for a critical discussion on social worker agency.
Social worker agency will be the focus of another article. The content analysis revealed three themes in the way social work literature engages human agency of clients or non-social worker groups, which are: i human action, ii meaning making and identity construction and iii normative claims for and barriers to human agency.
Social work research engages human agency by reporting on empirical research where human action is described. Consistently with sociological theories on human agency as a deliberative and thoughtful process, social work research provides empirical accounts of individuals human action located within a myriad of social contexts. Belliveau and Dodsworth are noteworthy examples.
Belliveau draws on a qualitative study with undocumented Mexican mothers living in the USA to illustrate the strategies they use to access, or to avoid, publically funded services and resources. Dodsworth's study of sex workers in the UK provides a sophisticated detailing of women's actions. She shows how some women strongly assert their self-determination and expressions of choice as sex workers. Significantly, the agency women expressed, and the limited agency other women identified, were mediated by disadvantaged life histories and criminal and moral forces that stigmatise sex work Dodsworth, ; also see Bruckner, Schormans used a photographic methodology that facilitated a research environment where people with intellectual disabilities actively constructed and edited a desired sense of self and outward representation.
By drawing on a methodology that challenged the positioning of research subjects as passive, people with intellectual disabilities actively worked to subvert assumptions that they were objects to be gazed at and defined. Agency as expressed through action was central to Zdun's research with immigrant youth imprisoned in Germany. He shows how some young adults actively resist confirmative behaviour and are not motivated to avoid recidivism. Moreover, in overtly engaging in criminal and violent action, the young adults feel a sense of superiority over authorities Zdun, Emond also demonstrated how human action contributes to emotional and social outcomes.
In research with children living in Cambodian orphanages, Emond details examples of children providing self-care and care to others. Their actions of providing care constituted practical means to achieve a sense of status and power, and to demonstrate their loyalty and respect to adults. In a way theoretically consistent with person-in-environment frameworks, social work scholarship dealing with human action explicitly ties agency to the social context.
Hussey's work on women's decision to terminate pregnancies as mediated by state legislation and public opinion represents a salient example. Other social work research extends the analysis of human action to embed agency within a biographical context, notably perpetrating violence against children Damant et al.
These studies highlight the actions of perpetrating violence and engaging in sex work as something the individuals owned, but nevertheless human actions that are located within previous life experiences of surviving abuse as children. Other social work research details human agency via actions and behaviours with an explicit framing of individuals as positive. Common among this research is the presentation of resilience Bottrell, ; Murray, Often, the research highlighting positive agency foregrounds public assumptions of groups as negative or powerless.
Dominelli et al. In a social context where authorities, including social workers, are suspicious of fathers, they show the positive efforts and endeavours that father's strive for.
Karabanow et al. They show how young people living on the streets in Guatemala pursue an innovative and entrepreneurial life in which they actively contribute to, and develop, informal economies. In addition to empirical research which highlights agency via human action, social work research engages with human agency through analysis of people's active meaning-making processes.
Armour draws on both questionnaire and qualitative interview data to show how Holocaust survivors made meaning of their lives. Her research highlights human agency by detailing, with analytical depth, people's intentions, aspirations and mental processes to achieve a state of survival. The reflective process of meaning making is likewise evident in numerous social work articles that consider the deliberative processes of identity formation and expression.
The research pays particular attention to identity formation and expression in light of major life disruptions and stressors. Berzoff argues that loss of a deceased loved one constitutes a means for people to transform the self and make positive advancements in their lives, whereas Borum shows that a strong sense of African American identity is protective against suicide and depression. Bentley provides a similarly nuanced account of the role of psychiatric medication influencing the ascribed and felt identities among people with serious mental illnesses.
The social work research examining people's sense of self and a projected self draws on broad sociological theories of identities as something that are not only plural—we have multiple identities—but identities as socially located. The social work research detailing the meaning making and identity processes demonstrates that people are active agents in the sense of self they feel.
As Carpenter-Aeby and Aeby show, identities are scripts that people work on. Through a positioning of people with agency, social work research shows how identities are not simply imposed.
Rather, people, even those who are marginalised or living in socially stigmatised situations, actively construct a sense of self. The process of identity construction, consistently with the linking of human action to a broader social context, recognises that identity construction—or avoidance—is socially mediated. Mik-Meyer's analysis is instructive. She demonstrates how people's sense of identity as a fat person is mediated by their participation in weight loss programmes and broader society norms.
Miller extends this proposition of identities as socially mediated by illustrating how, through participation in a sexual offenders' rehabilitation programme, people are purposefully encouraged to construct a specific identity. Solberg also shows how the counselling process encourages clients to articulate specific identities and narratives, but clients nevertheless construct their own identities incongruent with the service provider's expectations.
Thus far, we have shown two dominant ways in which social work research engages human agency, either through detailed accounts of socially mediated human action or through active meaning-making processes, including identity formation and construction.
The analysis revealed that social work research also considers agency by making normative claims that people ought to be able to express agency or by identifying barriers to agency experienced by marginalised groups. Archard and Skivenes represent the former. Drawing on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, they argue for the significance of children having an authentic voice in discussions affecting them. History and historical sociology amongst other disciplines are preoccupied with contingency — to what extent did things have to be the way they are?
Models that emphasize structure suppose that things very much had to be as we observed them. Models that emphasize agency suggest that things could have been otherwise. Thus, agency is the possibility of having acting differently in a way that changes an outcome. Make sense so far? If a scholar is interested in figuring out what the state could do in an economic crisis, then that scholar rates to emphasize the agency of the state in explanations of past economic crises.
All this is a long way of saying: Sociologists of the world, define your bothering terms. And while you are at it, could you perhaps specify what the claims you are trying to make are for? You could invoke one based on chance — the outcome of a coin-flip, etc. Whatever trips your trigger. First, you might be interested to follow up the idea of the counter-factual in ANT.
The idea is also defended, in its purely intuitive sense, by Callon and Latour in their response to the criticism of Collins and Yearly. There they do disclaim, however, that there are some difficulties with the method. Second, I am not sure that Callon has a theory of agency in the strictest of senses.
If anything, Callon wants to keep open the question of agency as much as possible. And while he obviously has a theory of how action takes place — i. Or, as he puts it, he has not much to say about the translation regimes that accompany the work of translation itself. But maybe that was the very point you were trying to make? Neville — Yes, yes and yes! I had forgotten the sociology of the door-closer article — such a fun piece! But yes, in general, the point I was trying to make is that ANT avoids agency vs.
I enjoyed the read, I think you might also find Latour on guns another useful article. I am also interested in this because in studying change, agency is an issue for me, at present i am settling for a this and that approach, things happen in combination, the how might be more important than why.
I appreciate your post and agree that it is troubling that sociologists do not define key terms and instead leave the reader to fill in the gaps. Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number.
Related Content Related Overviews action theory structuration social structure rational choice theory See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». Show Summary Details Overview agency. All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save.
0コメント