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Teachers enact their agency when they make decisions informed by, and aligned with, their beliefs and values. A balanced view of teacher agency attends to the interaction of the agent with structural and contextual influences. Agency can be enacted individually, in relation with others with similar beliefs and contexts, and/or collectively with others who possess disparate talents and operate in other contexts. Enacted in these ways, teacher agency provides avenues for critiquing and combatting the status quo in schools, providing children from minoritized backgrounds with equitable access to educational opportunities, and collaborating with stakeholders from outside of the educational institutions. While there is great potential for teacher agency to contribute to positive changes in the profession of teaching, in educational settings, and in the broader community, there are misperceptions (e.g., agency is classroom-bound, agency is fixed and invariable, agency is always about resistance) that sometimes limit educators’ abilities to enact agency. In order to support teacher agency, teacher educators must examine their curricula, their roles and responsibilities in supporting preservice and in-service teachers’ understandings of agency, and their own willingness to act as agents of change.

Agency theory is one the most prominent theoretical perspectives utilized in business and management research. Agency theory argues—using fundamental assumptions that agents are: (a) self-interested, (b) boundedly rational, and (c) different from principals in their goals and risk-taking preferences—that a problem occurs when one party (a principal) employs another (an agent) to make decisions and act in their stead. Essentially, the value of a principal-agent relationship is not optimized because the two contracted parties may have different interests and information is asymmetric (not equal). Agency costs are the result of principal and agent conflicts of interest and disagreements regarding actions that are taken. As such, monitoring and incentive-alignment systems are used to curb costs associated with opportunist behavior. Agency theory is commonly utilized to understand and explain corporate governance phenomena, including executive incentive alignment, board monitoring, and control of top managers; this strand of the literature is founded in economics and represents the bulk of the research in business and management. However, other important principal-agent relationships are commonly seen in business and society, such as with politicians/voters, brokers/investors, and lawyers/clients, and have benefited from the vast stream of research that has explored the principal-agent relationship in various forms and contexts. Also, alternative theoretical perspectives have emerged to accommodate variations of the principal-agent relationship. Namely, principal-principal agency, behavioral agency, and stewardship theories are prominent alternative theories that challenge, expand, or relax the basic assumptions of the classic theory to extend our understanding of important relationships and mechanisms in business and management.

Power is a complex topic that is viewed in entirely different ways by different writers. Power can be seen as a property of agents, with some agents having more power than others. It can be seen as a property of social systems, where structures hold power. It can also be seen in terms of specific actions by people to coerce or dominate, or it can be regarded as a subliminal force that leads people to think and behave in one way rather than another. It can be analyzed descriptively to try to explain how it is distributed, and critically to argue for changing structures to provide a more egalitarian and fairer distribution. Power studies flourished in the great community power studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these works suggested that democratic nations were controlled by powerful elites who ruled in their own interests; some that power was more widely distributed and elites could not simply rule for themselves; others that in capitalist societies, despite some counterexamples, elites generally ruled in favor of developers and capitalists. Later studies examined how people’s interests are defined in terms of the structural positions in which they find themselves, and how the very ways in which we think and express ourselves affect our individual powers.

An important attribute of a profession is the systematic study of its practices, to continually advance its service modalities. Throughout its history the social work profession has engaged in research and sought to strengthen connections between research and practice. National social work organizations and federal agencies, especially the National Institute of Mental Health, have all played key roles in stimulating and assessing the research enterprise. International and interdisciplinary research, advanced research methods and research/practitioner/community partnerships provide perspective for future efforts.

Social workers keep records to demonstrate accountability to their agencies, clients, communities, and profession. They also record to enhance practice and support a variety of administrative functions. This entry describes the history of recordkeeping in social work, and identifies important contributions to its development. The author discusses current issues related to computerization, wide access to sensitive personal information in records, and privacy legislation. The entry also outlines the characteristics of good records, those that meet the complex demands of contemporary practice.

Despite myriad descriptions and indicators used to define a fragile state, the international community has come to an agreement that a fragile state lacks the ability to maintain physical control of its territorial boundaries, provide basic public services, facilitate economic growth, and interact as a full member of the international community. Fragile states have historically experienced a disproportionate amount of natural disaster-related losses. For example, from 2005 to 2009, more than 50% of those impacted by a natural disaster lived in a fragile state, resulting in over $200 billion in losses. When natural disasters occur in such areas, they exacerbate already weak governance structures and further undermine their governments’ capability to respond to the crisis while simultaneously addressing challenges related to poverty and conflict. To remedy these and other complex issues inherent in fragile states, scholars are beginning to recognize the importance of investigating how fragile states can mitigate natural disaster losses through effective agency coordination and cross-sector collaboration. Agency coordination, in the context of natural disaster response, refers to the integration of facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication by public agencies for supporting incident response activities. Cross-sector collaboration refers to the sharing of information and resources by organizations in two or more sectors to achieve an outcome that cannot be produced by organizations in one sector alone. Because forecasts suggest that natural disaster-related losses will only increase in fragile states owing to population growth, urbanization, and climate change, there is a pressing need to understand the ways public organizations not only coordinate before, during, and after a natural disaster, but also how they collaborate across organizational sectors.

First-generation constructivist theories argue that international norms are constitutive and regulative—that they shape state behaviors and promote international cooperation. Theories focus on the life-cycle of international norms and probe their impact on cooperation across a range of issue areas. However, a new generation of scholarship has identified the potential for contestation and challenge in international norm development and maintenance. Critical constructivist theory recognizes powerful roles for agency and alternative definitions of norm parameters and compliance. Norm contestation can occur in multiple ways. First, critical constructivists recognize the norm development process itself can involve significant struggles over the definitions and prescriptions of normative architectures. Second, state leaders sometimes challenge the definition and prescriptions that flow from established normative architectures, and they may engage in contestation over the validity or justification of the norm or application in international institutions. Third, some norms may not become internalized in standard ways at the state level due to alternative patterns of norm diffusion and localization. Fourth, norm strength also can be affected by the actions of rival advocacy coalitions in processes of contestation. While contestation represents a vibrant research program today, critics charge that it suffers from significant limitations. No single theory of norm change or contestation has emerged as dominant in the first decade of research, and scholars are just beginning to grapple with whether greater attention should be devoted to contestation during norm development or localization/diffusion challenges. In addition, the concept of norm change raises an ontological debate about whether norms are static or dynamic in nature, and how best to study the cyclical development of norms (or norm change over time). A discussion of areas for further research and empirical testing of norm contestation theories is also presented.

For much of the history of the study of international relations, and of foreign policy as a distinctive subfield, scholars have debated the relative weight of agency and structure in shaping the course of international events. Often, the significance of agency versus structure depends on the scope of inquiry. Efforts to identify broad patterns of social interaction tend to play up the significance of structure, while studies of specific events bring agency to the fore. International relations theory is typically associated with the former, and foreign policy analysis (FPA) is more closely linked to the latter. That association suggests that the question of agency versus structure in international outcomes is settled in FPA in favor of agency. An assessment of the literature in FPA shows such a suggestion to be wide of the mark. Not only does FPA struggle with the question of agency versus structure that pervades the study of international relations generally, but also it wrestles with how to reconcile agency and structure in the context of psychological constraints on human cognition. Thus, rather than resolving the debate between agency and structure, the literature on FPA shows that it extends down to the level of individual policymakers. The debate over the role of agency and structure occupies two axes. The first is the engagement of FPA with broader debates over agency and structure in international relations scholarship. The second is the tension between agency and structure in FPA that emerges once psychology is incorporated into the analytical matrix. In both cases, the significance of structure in the actual analysis of foreign policy is far greater than common conception recognizes. This reality means that FPA represents the cutting edge for theoretical and analytical efforts to understand the relationship between structure and agency in international outcomes.

Since the end of the Second World War, police cooperation has experienced several transformations affecting the conduct of law enforcement operations across jurisdictions. These critical changes emerged from global legal, political and socioeconomic trends that constantly redefining the nature, structure and the role of actors involved in policing cooperation. For instance, the creation of vast free trade zones in North America, Europe and Asia has provided an important momentum for collaboration and coordination among national justice systems and the protection of the sovereignty of states. Moreover, the evolution of transnational criminal networks and the internationalization of terrorist activities have directly contributed to the multiplication of law enforcement and intelligence initiatives that transcends local and national jurisdictions. The so-called wars on crime, drug and terrorism ranging from 1960’s to 2010’s have generated the deployment of a formidable web of policing activities across the globe. In the 21st Century, a complex assemblage of public and private actors conducts police cooperation activities. These actors operate at several levels of geographical jurisdictions and cooperate through different organizational structures and legal frameworks.

There are a variety of ways in which teachers engage in activism. Teachers working for social change within their classrooms and teachers who engage in advocacy and organize to influence policy, law, and society are all doing work that falls under the umbrella of teacher activism. While there are numerous catalysts, many teachers become activists when they encounter unjust educational or social structures. There are also considerable obstacles to teachers recognizing their potential power as activists. From the gendered history of teaching to the widespread conception of teaching as a solitary and not a collective enterprise, there is rarely an easy path toward activism. The importance of collective as opposed to individual social action among teachers is increasingly recognized. Many cities now have teacher activist organizations, a group of which have come together and created a national coalition of teacher activist groups. Overall, teacher activism is an underresearched and undertheorized academic area of study. Possibilities for collective action should be fully explored.

The debate concerning the nature of education, and more particularly the debate as it is directed toward the discourse and logic of schooling, has customarily taken place within the social science tradition. As a result, educational research has been characterized by a modern positivist science which has tended to privilege knowledge relevant to a technocratic evaluation and control of educational relationships and achievements through a process of socialization. From the relationship between student and teacher to the relationship between school and society, the widespread acceptance of quantitative research findings and behavioristic theory reveals that the evaluation of educational issues has been tied to an understanding of reality as ideological as it is “scientific.” What should constitute a scientific inquiry that effectively counters positivist assumptions and what should characterize the inquirer’s relation to the real are still central questions within educational theory and practice in the philosophy of education. In responding to these questions, the positioning of education in the social science tradition has given rise to the politicization of education in an ideologically directed process of socialization which, in turn, has resulted in education, including schooling, being subjected to the idiosyncratic stranglehold and abuse of ideological and cultural considerations propagated in the name of a pseudo-scientific scientism. Furthermore, the problem concerning the nature of education is more authentically situated within the human science tradition than within the social sciences. This argument is grounded on a fundamental objection to positivism and the influence that this has had on the tradition of the social sciences.

The inhabitants of the Comoros archipelago, situated between the East African coast and the island of Madagascar, are Muslim and at the same time follow a matrilocal residence rule and, in two of the four islands, a matrilineal descent rule. This has consequences for women’s place in society, though their status and power varies according to their age and place in the social hierarchy, and with the political context. This article draws on three examples taken from specific island contexts to illustrate forms of agency accessible to the Comorian women. It shows how, having previously been invisible in political life, women played a leading role in Maore Island to escape the domination of the other islands’ elite by choosing to remain a French territory. It analyzes the way ceremonial exchanges in Ngazidja Island give elder and younger sisters different opportunities and place different constraints upon them in terms of how they behave and lead their lives. Finally, it shows the unexpected impact of an international program addressing Ndzuwani women on their empowerment in a patriarchal social context.

The history of psychology is characterized by unparalleled complexity of its methodology and uniquely ambiguous subject matter closely entangled with issues of power, social justice, and ethics. This complexity requires inordinate levels of reflexivity and conceptual sophistication. In effect, a historian of psychology needs to explicate no less than one’s worldview—a broad position as to how people are situated in the world, relate to, change, and get to know it, and how knowledge develops through time—all coupled with one’s broad sociopolitical ethos. Traditional histories of psychology have operated with an astonishing lack of reflection about these issues. One of many deplorable results is that psychology still grapples with its racist and sexist legacies and lacks awareness of social injustices in existence today. The recently emerging approaches have begun to remedy this situation by focusing on situated practices of knowledge production. This article addresses how human agency can be integrated into these approaches, while focusing on knowledge production as not only situated in context but also, and critically, as a world-forming and history-making process. In tackling the shortcomings of relational approaches including social constructionism, the transformative activist stance approach draws on Marxist philosophy and epistemology—infused with insights from Vygotsky’s psychology and other critical theories of resistance. The core point is that knowledge is achieved in and through collaborative community practices realized by individually unique contributions as these come to embody and enact, in an inseparable blend, both cultural-historical contexts and unique commitments and agency of community members. The acts of being-doing-knowing are non-neutral, transformative processes that produce the world, its history and also people themselves, all realized in the process of taking up the world, rather than passively copying it or coping with it. And since reality is in-the-making by people themselves, knowing is about creating the world and knowing it in the very act of bringing about transformative and creative change. Thus, the historicity and situativity of knowledge are ascertained alongside a focus on its ineluctable fusion with an activist, future-oriented, political-ethical stance. Therefore, the critical challenge for the history of psychology is to understand producers of knowledge in their role of actors in the drama of life (rather than only of ideas), that is, as agents of history- and world-making, while also engaging in self-reflection on the historians’ own role in these processes, in order to practice history in responsive and responsible, that is, activist ways.

Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question “What is man?,” inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes’s cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject’s rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.

Rhetorical invention is both a practice and its teaching—the capacity to create effective communication, and the instruction in this capacity. Teachers of rhetoric have provided over time a rich and durable supply of pedagogical resources for crafting communication in speech, writing, and multi-modal composition. These resources come down to us through traditions of teaching and practice, in handbooks, theoretical tracts, exemplary models, and heritable pedagogies. Such materials have sometimes succumbed but often resisted the temptation to standardize and systematize, since the art of rhetoric in its very nature speaks to each particular audience and occasion, a requirement that hinders efforts to give it rule-bound methods. The reasons for this resistance to standardization need to be explored as well as how invention has continued to provide heuristic guidance without prescriptive methodological tools. Lacking method, rhetoric is aided by the cultural support of convention, which in turn is modified for each new situation. Such a dialectic of convention and invention animates the ongoing registration of rhetoric to communicative practices and explains its durability as an unsystematic art.

Agriculture is at the very center of the human enterprise; its trappings are in evidence all around, yet the agricultural past is an exceptionally distant place from modern America. While the majority of Americans once raised a significant portion of their own food, that ceased to be the case at the beginning of the 20th century. Only a very small portion of the American population today has a personal connection to agriculture. People still must eat, but the process by which food arrives on their plates is less evident than ever. The evolution of that process, with all of its many participants, is the stuff of agricultural history. The task of the agricultural historian is to make that past evident, and usable, for an audience that is divorced from the production of food. People need to know where their food comes from, past and present, and what has gone into the creation of the modern food system.