Co-agency: reconsidering agency in guidance practice

Abstract

This article contributes a social justice perspective to the ongoing discussions about the concepts that inform career guidance theory and practice. Due to the field’s psychological tradition, career guidance practices often adopt highly individualised notions of agency that fail to grasp the contextual factors and societal structures from which agency emerges. In this article an alternative approach to agency is offered by repositioning agency as a relational phenomenon. First, based on the findings of an ethnography that focuses on career guidance for youth in the margins of education and work, I explore how agency emerges as a relational and joint construction. A concept of co-agency is elaborated to express the embedded, co-constructed and political nature of agency.