AGENCY REPORT

How work practices are met within the social care agency?

How work practices are met within the social care agency?

Working patterns

The working pattern of agency seeks to explain why and how service and control can succeed or fail in a wide variety of social settings. One actor, the agent, is modeled as acting for another, the principal. These actors face characteristic problems that can appear remarkably similar across social or organizational contexts. The agent's problems focus on serving the principal (and, sometimes, on avoiding or manipulating such service). The principal's problems generally entail dilemmas of how to assure that the agent will do what the principal wants him or her to do (although the use of agents can also be a way to defer, shift, or avoid real action). Thus, the analysis of agency relationships features both an agent side and a principal side. Because human systems often feature multiple agents, and multiple principals, the problems of agency can quickly become quite complex, both to the participants and to social scientists seeking to understand such behavior (Ahearn, 2001).

Agents, principals, and their problems are pervasive in human relationships. Because of the utility of seeing common patterns across such relationships, the working pattern of agency in various forms has spread across the social sciences. Thus, agency can help social scientists explain such otherwise diverse phenomena as employee-employer, physician-patient, legislatorconstituent, director-shareholder, parent-child, social worker-special needs client, and a host of other relationships and more complex settings that feature agents and principals in interaction. Agency relationships can be viewed as the building blocks in complex organizational settings as well as in societal networks (Davidson, 2003).

A central logic in the analysis of agency relationships focuses on the factors that interfere with perfect service and/or perfect control. Perfect agency , featuring the exact realization of the principal's goals in the relationship, rarely obtains. A host of factors can intervene to prevent perfect agency. They include, for example, biases or errors in perception, differences or conflicts in goals or values, differences in risk preference among the actors, differences in information conditions, incompetence or skill deficits, communication problems, lack of effort, emergent factors generated by the existence of systems of agent action, challenges from other institutions, and so on. In general, principals and agents expend resources on the costs of specifying what the agent is supposed to do and in monitoring and policing what actually occurs, or is perceived to have occurred. These costs have been termed specification costs and policing costs.

The agency seems biased toward the analysis of corrections; it is a theory of decisions about control (or of who gets control, e.g., decision rights). But agency has two sides: control and service. There is no reason why a viable theory of the firm cannot be constructed taking the service side as primary (e.g., other things equal, managers seek performance; correction is then taken as a secondary, marginal activity). Of course, the most descriptive theory of the firm may take a contingent approach that simply uses the ...