The Quality of Agency in the Media

Abstract

At the core of this work has been the impact and significance of agency throughout the processes of media reception and appropriation. The main aim has been to identify the concrete textual qualities and specific points of agency that facilitate the emergence and the mode of agency in different media texts. This required a broad-based literary review spanning different disciplines. Agency is not only at the heart of social action theory, but also fundamental to pragmatism, object-related approaches to social action, psychology, and certain strands of anthropology. Due to the internationalization of research and the popularity of Akteurstheorien, such as Actor-Network Theories and the like, agency, as a scientific concept, has progressively established itself in the German speaking academic context.