ABSTRACT
Agency is a familiar, polymorphic and widespread concept, whose heterogeneity can be traced back to the foundation of sociology, and to the modern philosophical conceptualizations of the agent; it is used to explain the potential to construct society from a grassroots perspective, as well as to explain the tension between the single individual and the social structure with its coercive rules. The aim of this chapter is to focus, on the one hand, on the unresolved issue of agency’s intertwining with the definition of the agent, and on the other hand, to shed light on the consequences of this on the possibility of a critical agency. After a cartography of the debate on agency in social sciences, the chapter analyses the entanglement of the theoretical approaches to agency with the theoretical definitions of what an agent can do, including contemporary reflections on the material, environmental and technological consequences of human agency.
