A Place for Agency, a Place for Positivism, a Place for Both over the Life Course
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A Place for Agency, a Place for Positivism, a Place for Both over the Life Course Alex R. Piquero 1,2 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
“Why don’t you meet me in the middle, middle.” Maren Morris “Middle” When I woke up this morning, I got out of bed, opened my bedroom door, went to the other side of the house, into the home office, turned on the computer, logged in, and opened up my word processing program. I then proceeded to create a new document and stared at the white screen familiar to us all. I did all of these acts purposefully and of my own accord. As a tenured, full professor nothing made me undertake all those steps on this particular morning. Yet, I also knew that while I did not necessarily need to work on this comment, I wanted to do so. I was excited about the idea in my head regarding what I thought the perfect opening paragraph would be. That excitement notwithstanding, I also knew that I had a deadline to get the paper submitted to the editor in a month’s time so I needed to work on it little by little rather than making a push at the end. So, in one sense, I had human agency, I did all of those things in the first paragraph purposefully, but in another sense I have a deadline to make and a career that requires me to write (and teach and perform service). So, in another sense, while I had and executed my agency, I had some external pressures to do so and thus my agency was affected by them. Fast forward to twenty years from now, when I will certainly be in late academichood, will I have the same human agency that I had when I started my career? Sure, I may still have some pressure to write, but it may be more external than internal (unless of course my identity is such that writing becomes part of who I am—almost habit-like, not something that I need to do for my job—more on this later). The rewards and
* Alex R. Piquero [email protected]
1
University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA
2
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
A. Piquero
accolades of publishing one more paper at age 68 may matter less than they did when I became a tenure-track Assistant Professor. In December 2017, JDLCC published a paper by Paternoster that focused on the importance of human agency for criminology, arguing forcefully that human agency should be a background assumption. In this article, he called attention to the lack of (theoretical and definitional) specification in many desistance theories of crime that claim to have a key role for human agency in the cessation of crime but do not develop the concept further and instead prioritize “event causality” or that things happen to persons that lead them to change (desist).1 For Paternoster, human agency amounts to action, “deliberate and intended or willed conduct” (p.350).2 Everything I talked about in the first paragraph was deliberate, intended, and focused on an outcome. I could have easily slept in, gone for a run, watched television—you know procrastinate— something which all academics tend to do every once in a while! But I purposely did so
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