Giddens on Social Agency

More on Agency (from Susanne Eichner, Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games, Film, and Television)

According to Giddens, obtaining social agency and being “able to act” means “being able to intervene in the world” to influence or change current states of af- fairs (Giddens 1984: 14). Some agents have more possibilities for action than oth- ers, depending on social circumstances such as available communications technol- ogy, their acquired knowledge, social status and/or commodities and their gender, nationality or race. Agency, in other words, is differentially distributed across soci- ety according to power, since “action logically involves power in the sense of trans- formation capacity” (ibid: 15). Analyzing human agency necessarily requires exam- ining the balance (or imbalance) of power between processes of social reproduction and of social transformation (cf. ibid: 22).