The term “agency” is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal foci—the actor's engaged response to situational circumstances—implicate different forms of agency. This article offers a theoretical model involving four analytical types of (...) agency (“existential,”“identity,”“pragmatic,” and “life course”) that are often conflated across treatments of the topic. Each mode of agency overlaps with established social psychological literatures, most notably about the self, enabling scholars to anchor overly abstract treatments of agency within established research literatures. (shrink)

Recent feminist literature has begun to call attention to the diverse linkages between work and family, including the extensive work married women often do for their husbands' careers. Using a longitudinal sample of American women born around 1910, this study employs quantitative and qualitative data to compare different aspects of wives' support and to develop an understanding of how women of their generation constructed their involvement. The authors begin their analysis by comparing wives' support across husbands' occupations and then examining (...) differences in activities and the ways in which women describe their relationships to their husbands' work. They find considerable variation in the way women constructed their relationships to husbands' careers. The evidence suggests that women who provided services directly related to their husbands' work may have been the most satisfied with their involvement. (shrink)