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The concept of agency has a role in a variety of fields and theoretical traditions and has recently taken on the strange role that Emre Amasyali and Axel van den Berg discuss in their two papers, as a term of moral or political approbation and blame, in cases where people fail to act against a structure that is supposed to be blameworthy. But this role is confused. Structures are made up of agents. But the kind of intentionality that is being blamed is ascribed to the structure, as though it is the agent. But blaming, it turns out, is not closely connected to cause but rather to social conventions of justification. Action explanation itself is culturally relative and faces the problem that intentions are unknowable. Self-reports are based on a combination of public facts and inner feelings, which are private. But the reports follow cultural conventions, particularly of justification, which vary wildly. We can resolve the apparent muddle here and make reasons into causes by appealing to a cognitive science view of action as involving predictive processing: the potential justifications are part of the expectations that go into a causal account of action. But they do not determine actions, much less represent them.

Responding to Martin, Turner, and Hitlin, we clarify possible misunderstandings of our two papers on “agency.” First, they do not presume or commit us to any form of universal determinism. We merely assume that the job of sociologists is to try and causally explain as much as we can of the variations in social life. Though our best efforts leave huge amounts of variance unexplained, there is no good reason for calling this unexplained variance “agency,” and there are several good reasons for not doing so. Second, we acknowledge our use of “structure” is quite a loose one, simply referring to the combination of environmental and personal factors that can help us explain social phenomena. Our notion of “causation” is, admittedly, no less “slipshod” than that used by most social scientists. We are happy to leave questions as to the true nature of causation to the philosophers. Third, we do not see in what way using the notion of “agency” to describe, much less account for, novelty (Martin), or to help “organize” the potentially infinite number of forces in play (Hitlin), advances our understanding or explanatory power. The normative and voluntaristic connotations of the term only serve to muddy the explanatory waters. Fourth, this doesn't preclude empirically examining the sense of “agency” and its causes and consequences. Even if the current wave of enthusiasm for “agency” is waning, a thorough conversation remains worthwhile if only to help avoid the same confusions popping up again in the future.

The use of the concept of “agency,” in the sense of action that is to some extent free of “structural” constraints, has enjoyed enormous and growing popularity in the sociological literature over the past several decades. In a previous paper, we examined the range of theoretical rationales offered by sociologists for the inclusion of the notion of “agency” in sociological explanations. Having found these rationales seriously wanting, in this paper we attempt to determine empirically what role “agency” actually plays in the recent sociological literature. We examine a random sample of 147 articles in sociology journals that use the concept of “agency” with the aim of identifying the ways in which the term is used and what function the concept serves in the sociological explanations offered. We identify four principal (often overlapping) uses of “agency”: (1) purely descriptive; (2) as a synonym for “power”; (3) as a way to identify resistance to “structural” pressures; and (4) as a way to describe intelligible human actions. We find that in none of these cases the notion of “agency” adds anything of analytical or explanatory value. These different uses have one thing in common, however: they all tend to use the term “agency” in a strongly normative sense to mark the actions the authors approve of. We conclude that “agency” seems to serve the purpose of registering the authors' moral or political preferences under the guise of a seemingly analytical concept.

Incorporating conservation of resources theory into the sustainable career framework, this study empirically examines how social support at work, harmonious passion and strengths use interact to bolster work–home enrichment.

This study tested hypotheses through a two-wave research design with a final sample of 357 academic respondents from public universities in Vietnam.

We found positive relationships between social support, harmonious passion and work–home enrichment. Strengths use significantly moderated these relationships.

Organizations should cultivate a supportive environment and opportunities to help individuals utilize social support and exert their strengths to be more passionate and enrich their work–home activities.

This study addresses the knowledge gap regarding the crucial interdependence and interactions between contextual and personal resources in promoting work–home enrichment, an underexplored aspect in sustainable career literature. It highlights how social support and harmonious passion enhance work–home enrichment. Using strengths is a fundamental boundary condition for these associations. The findings offer invaluable implications for leveraging work-related resources and personal qualities to enrich work and home domains for a sustainable career.