Human Agency and Social Work Research: A Systematic Search and Synthesis of Social Work Literature

Human agency is core to social work. Practice theories and frameworks position human agency as socially mediated, but assume that people possess human agency to play determining roles in their life circumstances. Some of the discipline’s seminal thinkers, however, argue that social work has adopted a disproportionate focus on the individual, whereby the human agency of social work clients and people experiencing marginalisation more broadly is...