Agency

Agency is the capacity, condition or state of acting or exerting power over one's life. Agency is the choice to take action or engage in free will and is characterized by intent not the outcome.

Un Pasado Que Aun Vive/A Past that Still Lives (2004), Joel Bergner

"To focus exclusively on either social structure or personal responsibility is to miss the recursive interaction between structural processes and individual agency. People are structurally complicit when they exercise their agency in ways that reinforce the unjust social structures in which they participate, regardless of their conscious intentions."

- Corwin Aragon and Alison M. Jaggar,
"Agency, Complicity, and the Responsibility to Resist Structural Injustice"

Agency, "is limited within the bounds of structural constraint; and the capacity of agents to affect social structures varies with the accessibility, power, and durability of the structure in question."

- Sharon Hays,
"Structure and Agency and the sticky Problem of Culture"

Agency "refers to the thoughts and actions taken by people that express their individual power. Agency is the power people have to think for themselves and act in ways that shape their experiences and life trajectories. Agency can take individual and collective forms."

- Niki Lisa Cole,
"How Sociologists Define Human Agency"

"So, while aspects of ethnic identity may be internally defined, and therefore the consequence of agency, the scope of those choices will be restricted and affected by social structure and any consideration of ethnic identity needs to take account of this."

- Saffron Karlsen and James Y. Nazroo,
"Agency and structure: the impact of ethnic identity and racism on the health of ethnic minority people"