Weber on the 4 types of Action (Agency)

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

Max Weber’s concept of action, distinguished from human reactive behaviour, can be considered seminal to further conceptualizations of human and social action developed in sociology. According to Weber, action is “the human behaviour when and to the extend that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful” (Weber quoted in Schimank 2010: 29). In social action the “subjective meaning takes ac- count of the behaviours of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (ibid: 38), in a meaningful rational means-to-ends deliberation. Social actions are further distin- guished into four major types: zweckrationale (instrumental/rational), wertrationale (value-oriented), affective and traditional social action.