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In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential. Social structure consists of those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit agents and their decisions. [ 1 ]
In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. Structure is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. [1] Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. [1]
Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. It is independent of the moral dimension, which is called moral agency.. In sociology, an agent is an individual engaging with the social structure.
Agency (law), a person acting on behalf of another person; Agency (moral), capacity for making moral judgments; Agency (philosophy), the capacity of an autonomous agent to act, relating to action theory in philosophy; Agency (psychology), the ability to recognize or attribute agency in humans and non-human animals
The concept of agency implies an active organism, one who desires, makes plans, and carries out actions. [5] The sense of agency plays a pivotal role in cognitive development, including the first stage of self-awareness (or pre-theoretical experience of one's own mentality), which scaffolds theory of mind capacities.
In practice, instrumental agency seems to fluctuate with various conditions, or at least the ability to exercise instrumental agency does. One of these conditions appears to be political/social, indicating that lower access to food or undernutrition has a bidirectional influence on women’s agency in East African countries. [31]
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Sociology overlaps with a variety of disciplines that study society, in particular social anthropology, political science, economics, social work and social philosophy. Many comparatively new fields such as communication studies, cultural studies, demography and literary theory, draw upon methods that originated in sociology.