Glen Elder

Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency*
STEVEN HITLIN University of Iowa GLEN H. ELDER, JR. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The term agency is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal focithe actors engaged response to situational circumstances implicate different forms of agency. This article offers a theoretical model involving four analytical types of agency (existential, identity, pragmatic, and life course) that are often conflated across treatments of the topic. Each mode of agency overlaps with established social psychological literatures, most notably about the self, enabling scholars to anchor overly abstract treatments of agency within established research literatures.
Agency has been central to theorists throughout sociologys history, though with different terminology in different eras. The current incarnation of this attempt to posit individual action in a world of social structures involves the seemingly ubiquitous agency vs. structure debates. This debate typically addresses the reciprocal nature of person and society, but largely fails to engage relevant social psychological work, the literature most amenable to understanding social actors. Sociologists place themselves against a naive psychological reductionism in an effort to combat a (rather American) tendency to reduce social phenomena to the level of the individual. However, this has led to simplistic, straw versions of human actors within larger, structural models about institutions and societies (Kohn 1989). From a social psychological point of view, these debates over the relative importanceand even existenceof agency are a bit peculiar. To maintain that social actors make decisions, no matter how socially circumscribed, is a fairly banal statement from a micro-analytic perspective. This is not, however, always the received wisdom in sociology, where there are those who render the actions (motivations, choices, goals) of actors as irrelevant, epiphenomenal, or error variation. 1 It seems
Address correspondence to: Steven Hitlin, Department of Sociology, W140 Seashore Hall, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242. Tel: +319-335-2499; Fax: 319-335-2509; E-mail: steven-hitlin@uiowa.edu. Support for this research was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (T32-HD007376, Human Development: Interdisciplinary Research Training) at the Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We would like to thank Scott Brown, Peter Callero, Victor Marshall, members of Iowa Sociology Progress on Papers working group, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Sociological Theory for comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1 Lest you think, though, that my comments and criticisms are directed only to those sociologists who call themselves social psychologists, I hasten to say that I think their sins of commission pale by comparison to the sins of omission of other sociologists. Social psychologists at least recognize the existence
Sociological Theory 25:2 June 2007 C American Sociological Association. 1307 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701
TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY
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often as if the sociologists use agency as a placeholder for some vague sense of human freedom or individual volition within a broader model. For sociologists, the tools toward a more adequate understanding of the human agent are located within the vast empirical and theoretical literature on the self, a body of work rarely linked with discussions of agency. The notion of time, highlighted in Emirbayer and Misches (1998) notable treatment of agency, is conversely rarely employed within models of the self. Temporal orientations are a fundamental aspect of social interaction (Flaherty 2003), and form the basis for developing an understanding of the human agency that bridges multiple uses of the concept and links to an established literature on the self. The self is at root a temporal phenomenon (Flahterty and Fine 2002; Mead 1932), and provides a pivot for such a synthesis. Actors temporal orientations are shaped by situational exigencies, with some situations calling for extensive focus on the present and others requiring an extended temporal orientation. Agentic behavior is influenced by the requirements of the interaction; as actors become more or less concerned with the immediate moment versus long-term life goals, they employ different social psychological processes and exhibit different forms of agency. The intra-personal perception of what might be termed a time horizon, a concentrated focus on a particular zone of temporal space, is a response to social situations and conditions of agentic action. Agency is exerted differentially depending on the actors salient time horizon. Viewed this way, agencys processes are less mysterious and draw on well-established scholarship on self-processes. We identify and describe four variants of human agency: existential, identity, pragmatic, and life course. These are meant as heuristics for linking theoretical problems with established research traditions; they have fluid boundaries and overlapping characteristics. These ideal types are intended as guides for future syntheses, and gloss over debates between social psychological theorists about the scope conditions of various approaches. Individuals exercise different forms of agency depending on their temporal orientation, though the first type (i.e., existential) underlies the three more socially interesting ones. These analytic types represent different relationships between an actor and the persons time horizon. We suggest that this approach will likely foster communication between theorists and social psychologists concerning a central concern of both, individual action within social structures. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF AGENCY Agency remains a slippery concept because of inconsistent definitions across theoretical projects. Loyal and Barnes (2001) trace back the modern debate to Parsonss volunteristic theory of action, and claim that the concept has no sociological utility. Collins (2004) suggests that the agency/structure rhetoric is a conceptual morass, distracting from the proper study of interactions prior to individual action. As grounded within people, the concept of agency is certainly influenced by Western conceptions of the actor (Holstein and Gubrium 2000; Meyer and Jepperson 2000), where individuals are the locus of social action in traditions focused on individual freedom. Current models focus on how apparently free actions lead individuals to (often) unconsciously reproduce their social structural milieu (e.g., Bourdieu 1977;
of people; other sociologists sometimes seem to act as if they thought that social institutions function without benefit of human participants, or at any rate without benefit of participants who act human (Kohn 1989:27).
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Giddens 1984; Layder 1997). 2 Most theorists addressing the agency/structure debate over the last two decades reasonably conclude that positing a strict dualism between agency and structure is erroneous (e.g., Cockerham 2005; Dunn 1997; Hayes 1994; Sewell 1992). Following Giddens (1984), the majority of such theorists understands the need to include both freedom and constraint while also noting the ways that free actions reproduce social structures. Agency is not universally accepted or valorized in sociological theory. Some (Fuchs 2001; Loyal and Barnes 2001; Meyer and Jepperson 2000) maintain that it does not exist, while others (Alexander 1993; Cahill 1998; Collins 1992) focus on sociologists tendency to romanticize Western conceptions of the agentic individual. The most prominent recent theoretical attempts at describing agencys relationship to structure offer minimal engagement with current empirical social psychology. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) define agency as: the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environmentsthe temporal-relational contexts of actionwhich, through the interplay of habit, imagination and judgement, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations. (1998:970) 3 Sewell (1992) focuses on the importance of rules and resources(drawing on Giddens 1984), yet like other theoretical treatments it is unclear what is the empirical work flow from this understanding. Without a proper engagement, however, sociological theorists run the risk of establishing a black box to be filled in by psychologists. This, however, is a poor approach to understanding the social individual if we rely on psychologists who tend not to find the existence of social constraints on individual volition as problematic. Psychologists, broadly speaking, typically employ some notion of agency, though some are less dismissive of contextual influences (e.g., Bandura 2001, 2006). While agency is assumed on many levels of analysis, only the field of life course studies explicitly engages agency from an empirical perspective (e.g., Elder 1994; Shanahan, Elder, and Miech 1997; Thoits 2003). To life course analysts, human agency is an individual-level construct, fundamental for social action. Even there, however, different types of agency are conflated. Almost all of these approaches a omit serious discussion of the self. Empirically, agency has been imbued with multiple dimensions ranging from notions of self-efficacy (Gecas 2003) to what Clausen (1991, 1993) has termed planful competence. Alexander (1992, 1993) focuses on moments of freedom and effort, while Thoits similarly discusses free will and the ability to initiate self-change. Bandura (2001) identifies four aspects of agency: (1) intentionality, (2) forethought, (3) self-reactiveness (self-regulation), and (4) self-reflectiveness (beliefs of efficacy). Most social scientists intuitively recognize agency as important, even as definitions abound. Ahearn (2001:112) defines agency as the socioculturally mediated capacity to act, an intentionally broad definition that is both helpful and
2 Evans (2002) offers a useful typology for these various theoretical treatments along three dimensions: structure/agency; internal/external control; social reproduction/conversion. 3 Fuchs (2001) criticizes this definition as heavy rhetoric added to mostly trivial conceptions of actors and intentions: actor has plans and will travel; plans dont work as planned; actor adjusts plans over time. This is pretty thin for a novel, as well as for a sociological science (2001:29).
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misleading. It highlights the primary theme that runs through a variety of definitions of the concept, but its abstractness does not help us develop ways to identify agentic action. Additionally, individual-level differences in capacity, skill, and forethought are ignored. Theorists attempts at thorough definitions typically do not lend themselves to empirical verification, while most empirical researchers tend to identify either simplistic notions of agency or consider it tantamount to unexplained variance. Broadly understood, agency deals with questions of personal causality (Bandura 1982). Marshall (2003) poses an important dilemma: Is agency correctly thought of as an aspect of human nature or as a variable? Is agency inherent to social action, or is it a differential property that somewhether through structural advantage or individual attributespossess more than others? Discussions of agency to date have not dealt with different levels of analysis, and this leads to much of the confusion surrounding the topic. Theoretical questions about the existence of human choice appear rather peculiar to microsociologists. For those focused on individual interaction, constraints on and processes of agency are the concern, not if it exists. Empirical studies point to the ubiquity of individual innovation and choice. 4 The existential question shifts away from abstract conceptualizations about the potential illusion of individual freedom. What concepts and empirical measures can we employ to explore the process ofand limits onindividuals agency? The field of self and identity (for overviews, see Owens 2003; Gecas and Burke 1995; Stryker and Burke 2000) has developed an extensive literature that empirically engages these very issues. Study of the self, a phenomenon that allows for both choice and constraint, individual spontaneity and social patterning, individuality and group and social identification, is fundamental tobut missing fromdebates about the nature of agency. SELF AND TEMPORALITY Curiously, the self is rarely implicated within current debates over the nature of human agency, though not for a lack of theoretical development (e.g., Burke 2004; Hewitt 1989; Holstein and Gubrium 2000; Stryker and Burke 2000; Wiley 1994). 5 Joas (2000) refers to the self as one of social sciences greatest discoveries; constituting active, socialized, meaning-making individuals. The self is an organized and interactive system of thoughts, feelings, identities, and motives that (1) is born of self-reflexivity and language, (2) people attribute to themselves and (3) characterize specific human beings (Owens 2003:206). Treatments of the self commonly imply the capacity for agentic action, but such links are rarely explicated. Meads focus on reflexivity as constitutive of the self is important for bridging these literatures. Though not directly concerned with the self, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) suggest that Mead (1932, 1938) offers the best conceptual tools for engaging agency. Callero (2003:117) argues that the principle of reflexivity is at the core of the Meadian tradition and provides a pragmatic foundation for understanding agency.
4 Bandura (2001) suggests agency can also be granted to meaningful social groupings, like social movements and organizations. Giddens (1984) rejects this position. Individuals, only, can exercise agency. Groups of individuals can represent the decisions of a majority of members, but the group as a whole does not act. 5 See Baumeister (1999), Gecas and Burke (1995), and Owens (2003), for overviews of the self; see Archer (2000), Callero (2003) for notable attempts to bring the self into discussions of agency.
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Dunn (1997) highlights the prediscursive ability to act as fundamental to Meads conception of the self. Meads approach captures both individual innovation, the prelinguistic ability to act outside of social dictates, and a more socially mediated, collaboratively generated aspect of the self (see Wiley 1994). Meads development of the reflexive relationship between the spontaneous I and the more stable, socially developed Me introduces an aspect of individual volition mistakenly ignored by those who mistakenly deny human subjectivity and agency (Dunn 1997). The capacity for reciprocal interchange between these two aspects of the self lies at the core of reflexivity. Meads incorporation of time into the self is vital for linking self and agency. With few exceptions, notably life course studies and suggestive work by Flaherty (1999, 2002), the temporal nature of human activity has largely been unexplored within social psychological models. Life course studies are centered around the notion of historical and unfolding time, but even there it is rare to find first-person temporal orientations being the subject of inquiry. Meads discussions on time are not well presented (Flahterty and Fine 2001; Joas 1985), perhaps contributing to the omission of temporality in most discussions of his ideas. The self exists, for Mead, expressly in the ever-passing present, a moment whereby the individual interprets situations and symbols as well as his or her past and future. Anticipation and memory are both shaped by the current moment, a moment that immediately becomes past as the actor plans and reacts to current situations. In this sense, we cannot abstract the actor from the situation; even the Me, Meads notion of the backward-looking aspect of self, is interpreted by the actor in the current moment. Ones past is not a stable part of the self, but subject to reinterpretation based on current circumstances. The temporally extended self involves understanding that the links between the past and present extend to the future (Lemmon and Moore 2001). Humans are more capable of controlling their temporal orientation than Mead suggested, and are able to engage in what Flaherty (2002, 2003) calls time work, employing ones focus to control ones temporal experience. The perceived duration of time is an interplay between self and situation (Flaherty 1999). Individuals do not simply passively experience time. In Flahertys notion, individuals exert agency (following Giddenss notion of could have acted otherwise) by shaping their experience of time; for example, self-consciously attempting to enact societally valued time activities (being prompt) or resisting the temporal experience of situations (passing time when bored in a college lecture). Agency, in this form, occurs at the level of the actors control over his or her self-experience, skills we learn at around three or four years of age (Barresi 2001). Flaherty (1999) discusses the experience of time within situated activity, suggesting that variation in the perceived passage of time reflects variation in the intensity of conscious information processing per standard temporal unit. We distinguish between Flahertys discussion of experienced time and a more agency-useful notion of temporal horizons, a concern with the focus on temporality as dictated by the situation that in turn influences the self. The type of agency discussed in Flahertys models forms the basis for what we will discuss as existential agency, and underlies agencys other three variants (pragmatic, identity, and life course). This dovetails with Banduras (1982) focus on the importance of forethought for understanding agentic action, but we build on Mead and Flaherty to differentiate the range of forethought that situations call forth within actors.
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TEMPORAL ORIENTATION AND VARIANTS OF AGENCY We adopt the perspective, following the social behaviorism found in Meads and Blumers work, that individuals actions are oriented toward meeting the conditions of social life (Swanson 1992). Peoples actions do not occur in a vacuum. This statement advances the sociologically banal observation that individual action is inextricably social yet not fully determined (though a strict structuralist might quibble with this assertion). We view agentic action as those actions whose ostensible origin begins within the actor, in the sense that, as Giddens (1984) maintains, the actor might have done otherwise. This covers behavior ranging from automatic (throwing a ball) to carefully considered (solving a math problem) to long term (enrolling in a particular university). All of these sorts of behaviors implicate individual action, effort, and intention. Incorporating the self, however, allows for the understanding of what these actions share beyond being self-initiated, and provides the opportunity to anchor discussions of agency within empirical research traditions. Agentic actions involve differential orientations toward the present and the future. Temporal orientations can be analytically separated and implicate different aspects of the self within action. Individuals shift their time horizons based on the problems that emerge within situated interaction. Agency stems both from individual and external circumstances that direct ones attentional focus. An actors attention gets focused on situational aspects perceived as most important. Our mental horizons, similar to frames (Goffman 1974) shape which information we attend to or omit (Zerubavel 1997) as situated activity evolves (Gonos 1977). Interactional models typically omit the nature of the actors temporal frames, over which we can exercise control (Flaherty 2002) but that also respond to situational exigencies. Circumstances may require heightened attention and thus extensive conscious control. Other situations involve monitoring ones role enactment and do not necessitate the same heightened focus on ones own behavior; but, role internalization leads to some automaticity in habits and routines. Even other actions are undertaken with long-term, not immediate, concerns in mind. We name these types of agency pragmatic, identity, and life course. Each type has, at its root, an existential capacity for initiating and controlling self-behavior. These ideal types have admittedly fuzzy boundaries, and systematically map onto actors future-oriented attentional foci. We explain each of these types of agency and offer some speculative links to established research literatures in order to anchor future discussions about agency within empirical social psychological processes. Three variants of agency/free will/personal control that are relevant to social life are anchored within a fourth type, an existential capacity for exerting influence on our environments. Four ideal types of agency serve to anchor the concept in different levels of experience and help resolve seemingly incommensurate dimensions. Discussions of agency can fail to anchor the concept in lived experience, referring to it with a-situational abstractions. The more removed a discussion about humans is from actual human experience, the more slippery the idea of agency becomes. We ground the concept of agency by situating debates within social psychological understandings of the person and social structures (see Table 1). A temporally based heuristic offers a schematic for understanding multiple, sometimes conflicting, uses of agency. These analytic distinctions overlap in practice. They direct inquiry toward established models of the self that might help scholars engage sociological questions about
Table 1. Types of Agency

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Agency Type All temporal horizons Pre-reflective capacity to defy social dictates Fundamental element of free will Ability to innovate when routines break down Capacity to act within socially prescribed role expectations Umbrella term for retrospective analysis of decisions made at turning points and transitions Mead
Analytical Scope
Temporal Scope
Characteristics
Representative Theorists
Existential
All circumstances
Pragmatic
Novel situations
Knifes edge present moment
Dewey/Joas Heise/ Smith-Lovin
Identity
Routine situations
Situationallyoriented goal attainment
Stryker/Burke
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Life course
Life pathways
Long-range future life plans
Elder/Clausen
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the structural patterning of agentic action, what Evans (2002) and Shanahan (2000) refer to as bounded agency. 6 Existential Agency Much human action is self-initiated, even if it involves automatic processing. Existential agency is inherent in social action, and as such is a universal human potentiality. This capacity for self-directed action underlies all of the types of agency we discuss and refers to a fundamental level of human freedom, Giddenss (1984) notion that one might have acted otherwise. At this level, we are fully free within the constraints of physical reality. Writers ranging from Sartre to Hegel to Goffman have discussed the fact that, at a fundamental level, even those without power (slaves, mental patients) have the ability to make decisions about their actions, though they face severe consequences for those choices. Humans can control many of their actions, but this capacity gets socially channeled, as we discuss below. The capacity for self-initiated behavior, however, is of less interest than its social dimensions and consequences. The capacity for action differs, for example, from the perception of that capacity, self-efficacy. Some scholars (e.g., Bandura 1997, 2001; Gecas 2003) view self-efficacy as the core of human agency, a reflectively accessible belief about ones capacities. It is not the capacity, itself. The self-reflective beliefs we have about our competence in various action domains is analytically separate from the actual capacity for acting within those domains. That said, self-efficacy theory highlights an important social psychological contribution to understanding agency. Rather than being concerned with free will as an end in itself, sociologists need to take into account self-reflective understandings of our abilities and capacities within specific domains to exert this will: Once formed . . . efficacy beliefs regulate aspirations, choice of behavioral courses, mobilization and maintenance of effort, and affective reactions (Bandura 1997:4). We develop a sense of personal empowerment (Little, Hawley, Henrich, and Marsland 2002) that motivates and guides our existential capacity for action. Pragmatic Agency Our capacity to exert influence on our action is only sociologically consequential insofar as it is utilized within social situations or with social outcomes. Meads writings about the knifes edge of the present moment captures the fundamental present-ness of social action, the need to attend to ones surroundings as time flows forward. Writing in response to the popular behaviorism of the time, Mead focused on actors ability to process social stimuli and not simply react passively (Flahterty and Fine 2001). This emergent, creative aspect of the person has formed the basis for much symbolic interactionist and pragmatic thought, and anchors pragmatic agency. Circumstances sometimes require heightened attentional concentration on ones immediate surroundings in certain situations. We focus our attention
6 To reiterate, we present this typology as a heuristic. The goal of bridge building between pure theoretical approaches and social psychology means that we gloss over debates within social psychology about the scope conditions of the relevant research. Just as theorists fall into different camps or traditions, so, too, do we find diversity among social psychologists about the importance of or mechanics behind various self-processes. Our presentation is intended to demonstrate the utility of a particular approach drawing on social psychological work; it certainly is not intended to definitively present a social psychological position on the self.
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most strongly on the present moment within problematic situations (Flaherty 1999). This type of agency, pragmatic, highlights the overlap with pragmatist insights into the contingent nature of human action (e.g., Dewey 1934; Joas 1993). Pragmatic agency is expressed in the types of activities that are chosen when habitual responses to patterned social actions break down. Much of our action involves habit (Camic 1986) as we rely on available, preestablished routines to guide interactions. If habits fail, however, we must make choices, and such choices necessarily occur within the flow of activity, not abstracted from it (like in rational models of social action). We are not dispassionate, analytical actors. We make choices within the flow of situated activity, and emotions and personality traitsalong with idiosyncratic personal histories, moral codes, and predispositionsinfluence the choices we make in emergent situations. People do not make completely random choices and new decisions in such situations. It is at this level that the self begins to be instructive for understanding a temporal model of agency. We are guided by our self, the reflective, intuitive aspect of consistency that guides interactions (Hewitt 1989). Individuals consistent responses within the flow of situated activity, especially with respect to novel situations, are yet to be fully fleshed out within action theory. Aspects of ones personality, biography, and values contribute greatly to the patterns of agentic decisions that are manifested within these pragmatist-oriented situations of novelty and creativity (Joas 1996). Meads I is the active portion of the self-concept that carries on a dialogue with the reflective Me, an interplay that fundamentally involves temporality, a neglected distinction in the literature (Flahterty and Fine 2001). The I is an internal experience of reflexivity (Dunn 1997; Wiley 1994), and exists prior to language, though over time it becomes socially shaped and channeled. The very existence of the I allows for agency when compared to an oversocialized view of individual action (Callero 2003). Sociological scholarship on the self has focused less on the I than the various Mes that constitute the person (Thoits and Virshup 1997). Meads I is conceptualized as a fundamentally spontaneous aspect of the self. It is, however, far from randomidiosyncratic, possibly, but not unpredictable. If our responses were, in fact, completely random, much social science would be untenable. Hewitt (1989) extends Meads theory by noting that the I is more than simply a product of social conditioning but is guided by its own inner logic, a fundamentally creative aspect of the self possessing what we call patterned spontaneity. The I, however, does not create itself anew in each situation. Rather, there is a patterned development over time of this creative, spontaneous aspect of self. The self is both a structure and a process, and the interplay between the socialized, developed Me and the spontaneous I captures the process notion of this construct. The I acts, and those actions are reflectively absorbed and compared with the Me. The I, however, while situationally emergent also implicates our personality, and our moral intuitions that circumscribe what we are really like. Over time, our sense of self is developed in part by observing how we are predisposed to act in novel, nonroutine, emergent situations. The personal anchor of the I may refer to those self-aspects we use to discriminate among actions that may or may not reflect our true self (Turner 1976). We rely on habitual responses to suffice for the engagement of many problems in action; the I comes into play when routine situations are interrupted and novel responses are called for, but these responses are not fully random. Other than positing an enduring I, little of this section is new to sociologists concerned with agency (e.g., Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Others have discussed
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this process at more depth than we can engage here. We might suggest, however, an empirical direction this work might take. The I is anchored in feelings, senses of self that might draw on the burgeoning literature on emotions (see Turner and Stets 2006). Emotions offer a window into the criterion that individuals use to judge whether various possible actions fit with their self-conception, the referent that people use while highly focused on agentic action in the present within problematic situations. Relatedly, those looking for possible mechanisms behind agentic action can look at affect control theory (Heise 1977; Smith-Lovin and Heise 1988) for a model of the ways in which emotional feedback serves to orient the social actor. The model, derived from Meads focus on language in interaction (Owens 2003), focuses on actors emotional consequences when situational emotional reactions differ from culturally shared meanings (sentiments). We attempt to confirm cultural expectations of how we should feel, and when our transient feelings do not match we attempt to shape our behavior to fall in line with cultural definitions or eventually we reshape our definitions, themselves. 7 Emotions serve as a gauge of the difference between internal expectations and internal results (Hochschild 1983), and are viewed (in American culture, at least) as windows into ones true self. Thus, the standards that guide the internal logic of the I and the emergence of pragmatic agency are inextricably social. Identity Agency Identity agency represents the habitual patterning of social behavior. Following established ways of acting, role enactment, or identity performance, involves agentic action. When we are following the guidelines of a social identity, we are not cultural dopes as Garfinkel terms it (see also Giddens 1991), blindly following social dictates. 8 Social norms guide us as we quite intentionally strive to internalize and live up to these norms and guidelines. 9 Achieving a situated identity involves another level of agency, where interactional goals are less about reestablishing sustainable interactions and more about achieving desired social or substantive ends. In such situations, enacting a role of teacher, spouse, or customer, our time horizon shifts away from the knifes edge present. Because such interactions involve a great deal of the taken-for-granted, our attentional focus becomes less concerned with the problematic now and more with goal attainment or enjoying successful interactions. 10 While novel situations require estimates about ones ability to act successfully, over time one no longer needs to reappraise the fit between abilities and the task at hand. Much time would be lost if living ones life required people to spend much of their time in redundant self-referent thought (Bandura 1982:25). Playing the role of professor does not involve a complete reconstruction of the self within a routine interaction; past behavior and experience guide current role-based behaviors, and free up cognitive space for focus on goals other than successful identity enactment.
7 ACTs mechanics are much more formalized and based on claimed identities than described here. 8 Social identities contrast with personal identity (Deaux 1992; Hitlin 2003; Onorato and Turner 2004).
Personal identity roots intuitions at the core of the Is patterned spontaneity. 9 Goffman (1983) states that we identify others both by categories and by individual attributes. Over time, significant others develop identities that shape our interactions with them. The process whereby we attribute identities to others is an intriguing corollary to this discussion of individual agency, but one that would necessitate its own space. For a cultural approach to attribution of agency, see Morris, Menon, and Ames (2001). 10 We do not refer to goals in a utilitarian sense. Following Collinss (1989) critique of Mead, we accept that sociability is, in itself, a central motivation underlying a great deal of social action.
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Even within routine situations, there is an element of unpredictability and contingency. The effort needed to maintain routine interactions is rarely tied into the concept of agency, but we do not passively enact claimed identities. The successful achievement of an identityeven those highest in our salience hierarchiestakes effort and defines ourselves as agents. We are not the first to argue this (see Holstein and Gubrium 2000), yet a multifaceted notion of agency is improved by noting this kind of social achievement. Identity agency captures the senseunarticulated in Goffman (see Schwalbe 1993) and much symbolic interactionist work (Miyamoto 1970)of the motivating nature of identity commitments (Gecas 1986, 1991). We do not simply act randomly in our lives. We select into situations that allow us to build and fulfill important identity commitments. Ones role as, say, a scholar puts a person in contact with very different situations than many alternative career identities. 11 Over time, the various identities we internalize motivate our actions, and we exercise agency in the very performance of those identities. We internalize our recurrent identities and they guide subsequent behavior (e.g., Stryker 1980; Stryker and Burke 2000). Within situations, we might look to identity control theory (see Burke 2004 for an overview) for an insight into the nature of identity influences on within-situation action. Feedback about our behavior motivates us to act in line with our claimed identities. We exert agency over our behavior, but with a different temporal focus than when our routines get interrupted. By discussing identity agency, we focus on agentic individuals within the interaction order and not on the interaction order, itself. The self, comprising both the patterned and spontaneous aspects of the agentic individual, is not only a performance, and it is not constituted anew in each interaction. There are personal commitments to lines of activity, captured through our understanding of identity processes, which motivate our actions and serve as standards for maintaining behavior (Burke 2004; Burke and Reitzes 1981). We do not passively live up to our identity commitments, nor do our identities unreflectively guide our actions. Social interaction is a constant interplay between internal standards and external feedback, between self-verification and selfpresentation. We modify our behavior based on feedback, and the maintenance of successful interaction relies on agentic choices. Agency does not stem from a blank slate; we have commitmentsto ourselves and othersthat we enact and recreate within interactions. 12 It is these very commitments that so often lead to the reproduction of structure highlighted in Bourdieus, Giddenss, and Sewells work. Not simply because various social positions act on us in a deterministic way, but because it is important to our sense of self to play the part well. This is in contrast to more process-oriented symbolic interactionists who privilege agency only when rendered evident in problematic situations (Snow 2001), what we regard as pragmatic agency. Both pragmatic and identity agency overlap and are present within interactions, just as affect-control and identity-control processes are both operating within situations. Analytically, however, separating these two terms usefully points us toward a way to unify literatures that sometimes appear to talk past each other.
11 It is important to note, but beyond the scope of this article, the limits placed on identity selection by biology and social circumstance. For example, racial and gender prejudice limits individuals potential identity claims. 12 We bracket an important notion of power inherent within interactions among various social identities. For empirical approaches to this issue, see Cast (2003), or an overview of exchange theory in Cook and Rice (2003).
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Goffmans focus on saving face, or Scheffs (2000) discussion of the power of shame, fit into the existentially agentic subtext to the identity-agency choices we make. Shame and embarrassment stem from not fulfilling a valued role adequately, and this threatens our sense of self (Owens and Goodney 2000). The stronger the identity commitment, we hypothesize, the more existential the threat one feels at failing to fulfill that identity. 13 There are certainly external sanctions, as well, that lead toward the maintenance of identities. This often occurs in situations where ascribed identities are forced onto individuals, as in situations of extreme racial prejudice. Such negatively valued identities may be internalized. What we refer to as identity agency relies on the personal autonomy we possess even while following social dictates. Probably one of the most crucial and adaptive aspects of the executive function [of the self] is the ability to guide current behavior according to long-term goals that lie well beyond the immediate situation (Baumeister and Vohs 2003:200). While action that follows social guidelines can be described as constrained action, individuals exercise agency in the successful (or unsuccessful) enactment of these lines of activity. While social commitments can feel binding, they are also motivating; we strive to live up to them and feel inauthentic if we do not. We exercise agency as we follow social commitments. Agency is not present only when acting in contrast to social expectations. Identity agency is the level at which Giddenss discussion of structuration theory best fits, the anchoring of practical consciousness in Goffmans theorizing about the taken-for-granted in everyday life. Much of this taken-for-granted exists at the level of social identity commitments. Identity claims delimit the manner in which actors can strive for what Manning (2000) refers to as credibility, the undercurrent of much of Goffmans work. We are accountable both to ourselves and others, based on the identities we attempt to claim and that we internalize; actions taken to produce identity-specific credibility, while patterned, involve individual choice and free will, and thus comprise identity agency. Goffmans (1983) discussion of the interaction order points to an important link between identity agency and the self: much routine situated activity requires a great deal of creativity and ingenuity with respect to the notions of self, meaning, situational propriety and so onthat is, the needs and requirements of the interaction order (Layder 1997:235). The interaction order is a deeply moral domain (Rawls 1987) of face-to-face interactions grounded in universal preconditions of social life (Goffman 1983). As Rawls (1989) develops this theme in Goffmans work, the interaction order necessitates limits on both self and social structure. Our focus on the self as a meaningful social phenomenon veers away from Goffmans vision of what is sociologically important (see also Cahill 1998). Yet, the internal, reflexive self underlies the myriad of techniques that individuals use to maintain the veneer of successful social interaction patterns (see Schwalbe 1993). Agency in the Life Course We do not simply act agentically with regard to temporally proximate goals (pragmatic agency), nor do we only act with situational goals in mind (identity agency).
13 An identity is not the same thing as a social role (Thoits and Virshup 1997), though they are commonly conflated. Identities define oneself in social space relative to others; one may have an identity as shy or humorous and align ones self with others who fulfill the content of those identities as they define them.
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Both forms of agency focus primarily on present situations and the ways in which human actors mutually construct interactions and, by doing so, reproduce and potentially alter social structures. Agency is constituted, in these situations, through established self-in-situation processes implicating the reflexive aspect of the self. Some of our actions, however, occur with a broader sense of our futures involved, and these orientations are important for shaping individuals adaptations to situations (Lutfey and Mortimer 2003). We term attempts to exert influence to shape ones life trajectory life course agency. 14 This extended temporal horizon complicates the nature of agency, as our reflexive capacities extend to incorporate distal goals and our beliefs about our ability to reach such goals gets folded into such agentic action. Life course agency contains two aspects, a situated form of agency (the exercising of action with long-term implications), and the self-reflective belief about ones capacity to achieve life course goals. The former is a longer-range version of existential agency, a capacity all individuals possess. The latter is a self-belief, similar to notions of personal control (e.g., Mirowsky and Ross 2003), which reflexively guides decision making with extended time horizons. This belief influences perseverance across difficult life course situations much like self-efficacy influences individual self-perceptions of capacity for solving pragmatic agency problems; self-perceptions of agentic capacity have social consequences. People who perceive more agency are more likely to persevere in the face of problems, either within situations or in encountering obstacles that represent structural impediments (e.g., Bandura 1992). For example, men are more likely than women to dismiss negative feedback on mathematical abilities and overattribute successes to their own ability (Correll 2001). Some people have self-concepts about the possible success of their effortswhich may be accurate or inaccurate that allow them to endure setbacks or plan their lives with longer-term goals in mind, such as postponing employment to attend college. This distinction is captured in Clausens (1991, 1993) notion of planful competence, an individual characteristic underlying agency involving three dimensions: self-reflexivity, dependability, and self-confidence. Agency, as planful competence, represents an individual-level construct that dictates a persons facility with making (and sticking to) advantageous long-term plans (Shanahan, Hofer, and Miech 2003). A focus on the life course highlights the historically contingent constraints within which individuals develop and exercise agency (Shanahan and Elder 2002). Life course theorists (e.g, Elder 1994, 1998; Mortmer and Shanahan 2003) highlight agency as one of the core principles for understanding the intersection of individuals and their life pathways, though the topic is not always employed consistently. Marshall (2000) sees at least three versions of agency in Elders writing: agency as capacity, resistance, and transition. In our typology, resistance can be exercised either pragmatically or through advocating important self-identities. Both forms have potentially transformative aspects. 15 Capacity seems to be related to the motivating power of identity commitments as well as the existential ability to self-initiate
14 We bracket what we call the opportunity structure of agency (Hitlin and Elder forthcoming). Agency is exercised within socially structured opportunities. Of course, members of privileged groups have more structural opportunities to shape their lives and direct their actions. Males, whites, and individuals with monetary resources are structurally more likely to have the resources to exercise the kinds of agency we discuss here. 15 The concept of agency as resistance traces to a structurally-oriented view of society, with human activity seen primarily as residual action over and above macro-structural forces. For an empirical attempt to grapple with this conception, see Rudd and Evans (1998). See McFarland (2004) for an in-depth discussion of resistance itself.
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actions, what we term existential agency. Transition is closest to what we term life course agency, the ability of individuals to make choices at turning points in the life course. We can differentiate between agency as a capacity that all individuals possess, like existential agency, and a variable capacity that some people utilize with greater facility. Competent people can make decisions with a future orientation. Some people have more opportunity, however, to develop a sense of confidence due to experiencing successful decisions. We can analytically separate the pure capacity for life course decisions from the ability to successfully implement them. Life course agency is an analytical construct that we can apply to the study of individuals from a cross-situational perspective: agency at the level of the person can be defined as the ability to formulate and pursue life plans (Shanahan and Elder 2002:147). It is exercised when individuals act in line with a distal, future time horizon and points to a conglomeration of decisions and events that often only get linked together in hindsight. The concrete events that make up a turning point in ones life may not be immediately clear at the time. Life course agency refers, we might say, to the selection of various identities in the process of making (socially delineated) life course transitions. Identity agency focuses on the behaviors that stem from the internalization of those identities. The possibility of possible selves (Markus and Nurius 1987)cognitive representations of who we would like to becomeare motivational, long-term goals for the self, and offer one way to conceptualize life course notions of agentic action. These beliefs about possible future selves motivate current agentic choices. Life course research views agency as a central aspect of constructing the life course (Elder, Johnson, and Crosnoe 2003), yet even here, empirical examinations are rare (McMullin and Marshall 1999). Agency is often asserted, claimed to be the post hoc result of differential life trajectories. The increasing individualization and mobility of Western societies have shifted the burden of responsibility for creating and sustaining identity to the individual (Baumeister and Vohs 2003:198). Agency is often treated as precisely the residual from normative patterns of behavior (Marshall 2000). Empirical treatments of agency are complicated by the constrained nature of individual agency within social structures that channel life course options. We must stress that there are extreme temporal variations within life course agency, and a full article might be written discerning differences between types of future horizons. Certainly, social domains (work, family formation) call on different forms of long-term planning, and the concept might profitably be tied into literatures on socialization and learning. We intend the concept to be broadly applicable to organizing scholarship on the creation of ones individual biography. As individuals organize their lives, they can be prompted to focus on major life events, major occupational transitions, issues of personal relationships, educational histories, and the like. Life course agency refers to individual capacities to orient themselves toward long-term outcomes, across social domains. Life course scholars can document transitions and turning points in others lives after the fact, but we are focusing on individual, firstperson capacities for temporal focus on the future. Individuals are active agents in shaping their biographieswithin a myriad of constraints, of coursebut people differ in their ability to successfully implement these strategies. Empirical measures on the topic are far from consistent. For example, Kiecolt and Mabry (2000) examine the ways in which college students attempt to generate more positive self-conceptions, and the results of such choices are defined as reflecting agency. Gecas (2003), in a recent review of the concept in life course theory, focuses almost exclusively on changes in self-efficacy over time. Shanahan
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et al. (1997, 2003) employ Clausens (1991, 1993) concept of planful competence as a measure of individual skill with agentic choices. Hitlin and Elder (forthcoming) incorporate optimism as an important psychological component of life course agency. Thoits (2003) suggests that holding more identities reflects greater personal agency. Life course agency involves individual orientations toward potential self-capacities for constructing and engaging in successful long-term plans. It highlights the variable nature of the life course at particular junctures based on social structural position and personal resources that reflect what Shanahan and Hood (1998) term bounded agency (see also Evans 2002). For example, greater perceptions of personal control one aspect of agencylead to greater health among elderly adults (Krause and Shaw 2003). This form of agency lessens across the life course, explained in large part by physical impairment, less education, and poorer health (Schieman and Campbell 2001). Our agentic actions aim toward goals that change in relation to our location in the life course (Schulz and Heckhausen 1999). The process of identity selectionor ascriptionoccurs most often at major transitions (Elder and ORand 1995) such as the transition to adulthood (Graber and Brooks-Gunn 1996). Such transitions are rarely spontaneous, at least early in the life course (in contrast to the death of a parent or spouse, or losing a job), but fundamentally affect the self. These transitions are normative, but they allow for personal discretion; within limits, the timing and order of these choices are up to individuals. Such limits can be both biological and structural; we do not have the power to become richer, or smarter, or often to accumulate resources that enable more privileged individuals more options. Much of sociology focuses on the limits and social structural constraints that channel peoples choices. What can be lost, however, is the fact that within these limits, choices are made. Agency is present. What we term life course agency leads, then, over time to the accumulation of identities that are claimed at the level of identity agentic actions. Over time, these actions get folded into our sense of self and become guiding forces for identity agency. Life course agency focuses on the transitions by which we claimor leave (see Ebaugh 1988)social identities (see also Heinz 2002). This type of agency may not be present in patterned interactions, but rather is found in the big life choices we make about the timing and sequence of new pathways to follow. The self is well suited for understanding agency within a longitudinal approach (e.g., Gecas and Mortimer 1987; Honess and Yardley 1987; Owens and Goodney 2000), and is central for understanding the construction of the life course (Heinz 2002). Evidence suggests continuities of the self over time (Alwin, Cohen, and Newcomb 1991; Markus and Wurf 1987), with small fluctuation around a moving baseline (Demo 1992). Personal continuities in the self contribute, and derive from, individuals constructions of their life courses (see Atchley 1999 and continuity theory). Serpe (1987) focuses on the ways that socially structured identities remain largely stable across time precisely as a result of the stability of social structures. Life course agency is also strategic for understanding the interplay between individuals and social structures, as seen in Emirbayer and Goodwins (1994) focus on persisting networks that influence agency. A great deal of work (for some overviews, see Lutfey and Mortimer 2003; Roberts and Bengtson 1999; Settersen 2003) discusses the interplay between social structure and individual life choices, but rarely does this work extend downward to an extensive discussion of influences on the individual. Alwin et al. (1991) offer support for rather striking continuities in individuals across their
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lives, in large part because ones attitudes serve to select individuals into situations and relationships that reinforce those attitudes over time. Agentic choices reproduce social structures. CONCLUSION Humans are fundamentally active beings. Positing the existence of agency is an edifying theoretical exercise, but current treatments are unfortunately too abstract to offer guidance for empirical research, especially across different dimensions of social action. Agency, while an abstract concept, occurs through situated action (Howard 1994). Actors must solve problems and enact or construct identities and relationships in order to maintain their place within institutions and structures. Theory and research have largely occurred in isolation, but incorporating social psychological theory and research on the self helps address core sociological concerns about agency and structure, and can foster engagement with issues about constraints on or social facilitation of different sorts of agency. We offer a model of agency based on the temporal horizons of actors within action situations. Being alive requires action, and for reflexive beings this involves choice, analysis, reflection: Choice is part of the human condition, its content contained in the subjective experience of the person emerging in and through the social process (Stryker and Vryan 2003:4). From this perspective, agency is a necessary aspect of organisms struggling to adapt and (in the case of humans) make sense of their environments. 16 Some of the more theoretically-oriented discussions of agency have lost touch with these necessary, lived realities, and in so doing show negligible engagement with the robust social psychological literature that describes how people interact with their environments. This model is meant as a heuristic guide for directing theorists toward relevant micro-literatures. There are fuzzy boundaries between the analytically separate levels we discuss. Mapping types of agency and their relation to the reflexive self, we provide a window into relevant social psychological literatures in order to facilitate more empirical treatments about the conceptto move forward from the debates over the nature and existence of the topic. By incorporating a notion of time, we suggest how overlapping, seemingly incommensurate notions of agency can, in fact, be organized. Situations call forth differing temporal orientations on the part of the social actor; agency occurs in the flow of responses to situational exigencies. Routine identity enactment involves a different form of agency than does novel action, but both are actions guided by the reflexive actor. The sociological issue is not whether agency exists, but the extent to which we exercise it and the circumstances that facilitate or hinder that exercise (Berger 1991). By anchoring agency within established research traditions of social psychology, we hope to advance study of bounded agencyits precursors, processes, and influence on social outcomes. Human agency is inextricably social, structured by interactional situations. Action problems orient actors toward immediate, routine, or long-range goals that implicate different attentional and self-processes. Individuals approach situations with frames that focus their attentional processes on relevant stimuli, and the feedback
16 While privileging a Western conception of self, we claim that this basic conceptualization can carry across cultures. The symbolic content of what it means to be a human agent, and the weight given to ones own feelings and intuitions, certainly varies by culture (Cross 2000; Kondo 1990).
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they receive influences their temporal focus. People can and do exercise control over these horizons (Flaherty 2003), employing an existential level of agency. However, our focus within situations involves a combination of this existential capacity and situationally circumscribed influences on our attentional processes. Social psychologists have only rarely engaged this temporal dimension, yet time is instrumental for understanding the relationship between situated action and social structures. We link types of agency to actors temporal orientations that derive from responses to situations, shaped by cultural frames. A routine situation has established frames, whereas novel situations require more focus on the self and the moment, suggesting that applied frames either are not specific to that situation or are borrowed from other situations. Actors temporal horizons shift in response to situational influences and lead to different types of agentic action. Actors can, of course, agentically shift their own temporal horizons (Flaherty 2002), but failure to properly be attuned to a situation would likely lead to social sanctions of some form. This allows us to map out differing uses of agency across theoretical and empirical treatments, improving on the vague notion that humans have some sort of free will and are not simply buffeted around by structural forces. This capacity for self-initiated action, however, is not in and of itself enough to explain social processes surrounding the exercise of personal agency. Actors who are engaged in situations that we refer to as pragmatic are on Meads knifes edge in the present moment, with their temporal focus squarely on themselves and interactional goals. Much situated social behavior, however, is of the more routine variety. That does not mean people are passive automatons, mindlessly carrying out socially dictated roles. We know a great deal about the effort behind maintaining even routine social action, and enacting claimed social identities. However, the temporal focus during these encounters is less immediate insofar as a novel or ruptured situation drastically focuses ones attention. The agency involved during these interactions is of a different sort, but still demonstrates self-initiated action. 17 Finally, situated actions are not always concerned with the situation. Major life decisions occur through agents making choices, but those choices can be analytically distinguished from attempts to save face or to enact a particular identity. These actions can be studied analytically within a life course framework, keeping in mind the distinction between the capacity to exert influence on ones life (a universal capacity of socially competent individuals) and the self-perception of that capacity (a sense of personal agency that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy). The latter form involves measurable sociological constructs (e.g., as personal control or planful competence) and its social antecedents and consequences can be determined; perceptions are important to social-psychological analysis, not as independent but as intervening variables (Kohn 1989:31). Much more needs to be learned about how individuals generate and employ agency in the life course (Heinz 2002), but this is a promising arena for interdisciplinary research. Recent calls for exploration of mechanisms needed to explain empirical associations (Reskin 2003) suggest that relevant social psychological insights are not being employed in the service of broader sociological work. Discussions of agency have been largely uninformed by empirical social psychology. We offer this typology in
17 Perhaps the experience of agency is different depending on an actors self-orientation. For example, Turners (1976) suggestion that some people feel real in situations when relying on impulse while others feel real during institutional settings might theoretically map on to our distinction between pragmatic and identity agency.
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order to build bridges between related literatures addressing similar questions. Study of the self, quite popular across social psychological disciplines, can be harnessed to guide inquiries about the social nature and distribution of individual freedom within social structures. Social psychologists have not, on the whole, been adequately concerned with issues of time (George 1996). The temporal nature of the self has been theorized, but not systematically linked to macro-sociological concerns about the nature of agency. Individuals exercise different forms of agency as their socially patterned selves interact within bounded situations and social structures. We hope to encourage scholars concerned with notions of agency to draw more extensively upon established research literatures that deal, though often implicitly, with similar concerns about the relationship of the self and social structures. REFERENCES
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Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency*

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

Table 1. Types of Agency

Knifes edge present moment

Dewey/Joas Heise/ Smith-Lovin

Situationallyoriented goal attainment

Long-range future life plans

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

TIME, SELF, AND THE CONCEPT OF AGENCY

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