AGENCY
Human agency is very similar to the notion of free will in that agency may be understood as the capacity to exercise creative control over individual-level thoughts and actions.
In the ideals of Western democracy, there is a widespread assumption that humans are imbued with free will and, as such, routinely exercise agency within the domain of their personal choices as well as in the social and political realm.
Timothy McGettigan argued that, despite the inescapable impact of societal influences on human psychosocial development, it remains possible to locate agency within the coercive context of social reality. McGettigan argued that actors demonstrate a capacity for agency when, on perceiving evidence that is in discord with their understanding of reality, they refashion their comprehension of reality to facilitate an understanding of that discordant evidence.
The existence of a capacity for redefining reality establishes that individuals who are situated within rigid contexts of social control can emancipate themselves sufficiently to think and act in a self-determined manner, that is, to exercise agency.
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