Slippery Slopes from ascriptions of agency to agentic capacities - Methodological and political risks in the operationalization of agency in interview studies

The notion of agency has been the subject of extensive debate in social theory, gaining its reputation for being a particularly “slippery” concept. Reflections on operationalizing agency in field-based empirical studies, however, have been rare. Using qualitative interview studies on academic careers as an example, I will distinguish between four different ways to relate interviewee statements to the theoretical notion of agency: (2) representational relation, (2) causal relation, (3) biased relation and (4) ideological relation. While the representational and causal arguments support the operationalization of agency by means of interviewee statements, it will be argued that the third and fourth relation represents certain slippery slopes which impair the analytical value and political implications of the concept.