ABSTRACT
In proxy agency, what one person or group does, under appropriate conditions, counts as another agent or group having done something. Proxy agency is not limited to groups. An individual may have a spokesperson, or assign a power of attorney to allow a proxy to close on a home sale. Proxy agency rests on the possibility of defining a status role whose function is to assign status functions to objects, or whose function is defined in terms of the products of agency in that role having certain status functions. A status role is a special kind of status function. A status function is a function defined by constitutive rules for the use of an object, say, in an essentially intentional collective activity type, which is assigned, by a tacit agreement in the community using it, to a particular object or event, or type of object or event.
