Agency and Mental Models in Heterodox Economics
Agency is power-the power to act and the power to choose, the power to imagine and the power to understand, engage, and manipulate the surrounding biological and social environment. Mainstream economics adopts the western philosophy of entirely self-determined, autonomous, and efficacious agency in its employment of methodological individualism and optimizing, rational economic man. As such, agency is endowed without discretion to all individuals who independently choose to act based on the weight of objective costs and benefits (Davis 2003, 113). To the heterodox economist, agency cannot be captured or analyzed by this simple rendering of the individual. Rather, agency must be examined by its own internal logic and responses to external forces; how it came to be and how it evolves. The argument set forth is that the conceptualization of agency as a product of the individual's mental models and interaction with the surrounding structural environment unites otherwise seemingly disparate heterodox groups of thought. The procedure is simple: the concept of interactive agency is explored from the perspectives of five different heterodox groups of thought! with an eye toward possible common ground.