The question of agency and directedness in living systems has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. What principles and mechanisms underlie the emergence of agency? Analysis and dynamical modeling of experiments on human infants suggest that the birth of agency is due to a eureka-like, pattern-forming phase transition in which the infant suddenly realizes it can make things happen ...

In cognitive neuroscience the sense of agency is defined as the as the experience of controlling one’s own actions and, through this control, affecting the external world. At CHI 2012 I presented a paper entitled “I did that! Measuring Users’ Experience of Agency in their own Actions” [1]. This extended abstract draws heavily on that paper, which described an implicit measure called intentional...

Recent findings suggest that visuomotor performance is modulated by people's beliefs about the agency (e.g., animate vs. inanimate) behind the events they perceive. This study investigated the effect of instructed agency on ocular tracking of point-light motions with biological and nonbiological velocity profiles. The motions followed either a relatively simple (ellipse) or a more complex (scri...

With the rapid trend of the human resources strategy of the globalization, dispatched work becomes the result of flexible human resource using. Dispatched work as a newly risen service industry, belong to the short term and more flexibility work styles and make the firms cost down for the manpower requested. This study probes into the manpower coordinate with the agency workers needs the correl...

The concept of agency is important in philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Our aim in this paper is to highlight some of the issues that arise when considering the concept of agency across these disciplines. We discuss two different views of agency: agents as actors (the originators of purposeful deliberate action); and agents as intentional systems (systems to which we a...

Globalisation and reflexive modernity are said to be generating new opportunities for local territorial and individual agency. As actors seek to intervene in order to ensure an equable socio-economic outcome, they increasingly employ the theory of endogenous development. However, the theory itself does not explain the nature of human and territorial agency, nor the mechanism by which such agenc...

This study aims to examine how users respond to a newly implemented enterprise information system. In doing so, a relational perspective of human agency is proposed. A relational perspective to agency emphasises the relationship between actors and their environment, and views actors in multiple sociotemporal contexts, with varied orientations toward past practices, present contingencies, and fu...