printDevelopment of Digital Technologies and the Agency Issue:
Towards a New Theoretical Optics
Sorokin P.S.
Candidate of Sociological Sciences, Associate Professor, Leading Research Fellow, Head of the Laboratory for Human Capital and Education Research, Institute of Education, HSE University, Moscow, Russia psorokin@hse.ru
Sorokin P.S. Development of Digital Technologies and the Agency Issue: Towards a New Theoretical Optics. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2025. No 8. P. 14-25
Digital technologies have radically transformed social reality and created new challenges for theory and practice. This puts under question prevailing scientific ideas about both the possibilities of institutional regulation/coercion of human activities and the transformative potential of human agency. Based on the analysis of discussions in sociological theory and on the review of the latest developments in neigboring disciplines, we propose a conceptual model to describe the possibilities and limitations of human agency in the context of digital reality as a special type of structure. Our focus is on the «strong» agency that is, activities that significantly change social environment. We outline two major points of interest. On the one hand, it is a zone of “conditionally” free creative individual action utilizing the resources of the digital environment as a means to achieve the goals of creating new or transforming existing communities, modes of behavior, practices, etc. On the other hand, it is a zone of “hybrid” agency, that is, human activity, stimulated (at least partially) and supplemented by a targeted, customized system of institutional influence provided by artificial intelligence systems. In our opinion, it is in these areas that the main challenges lie for advancing sociology towards understanding the problem of human agency as a key factor in institutional change, driven to a large extent by the advances in digital technologies.
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