Different academic disciplines have different takes on the word “agency”:

• Philosophy sees agency as the capacity to act intentionally and rationally to bring about change in the world.


• Psychology views agency as a person’s capacity to exert control over their environment and experience a sense of ownership over their actions.


• Sociology understands

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Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I... See more

Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you. Remarkable people typically go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a telegraph message boy is one opportunity; asking how to operate the telegraph is another. He was

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