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Why is "agency" such a buzzword all of a sudden?


I read a lot, and have recently been seeing the word "agency" almost everywhere.

By "agency", I'm thinking of the social-science definition: "the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices", or perhaps more simply, "achieving control".

Why are people obsessing over this? Is this just the younger-sibling syndrome: "Everybody else has more choices than I do"?

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Good question. I never heard it used this way until the last couple of years.

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I don’t know about any current trends but I’ve heard it used similarly in legal context and even discussing physical processes.

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It's pretty trendy and super cool to be a victim now🙄

You know that feeling you get when the car is frozen at 5 in the morning and you have to scrape off the windshield, the streets are sheets of ice, you have 3 smokes and a quarter tank of gas and 90 minutes to get to the job you dislike and you HOPE to get home alive in the dark again twelve hours later after a day of nonsense with a 6-pack of beer and a paycheck...That's ALL the 'agency' anyone gets unless you were smart enough to be born a rich kid LOL

'Agency...'
Code word for 'I'm special, why is this all such a mess everyday?!?'

Luckily, most of us are not crybabies

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Other things that have come and gone

"Parse" they are parsing words, he's parsing words, let's parse that
"Underscore" the president underscored his point by...

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I hate that crap

When we get a really convoluted and ass-hat level message from The Bosses at work the lesser bosses always start with 'Let's Unpack This Memo'...corporate speak makes as much sense to me as the Wookie language and just proves the higher ups are staying up late making up words for the stuff we already do to justify their overly inflated salaries...

Weak mimics seem to run the work world

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Ah yes..."unpack" has become quite popular the last couple of years.

In my early working days bosses would say "touch base," which doesn't sound so bad now but was a little pretentious back then. In the 90s a buzzword was "cross-training" (relating to work, not exercise).

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"Cross-training" definition:

We want everyone to be trained in everything, so we can fire anyone at a moment's notice and not have to scramble for a replacement.

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Synergy.

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I've used "let me break it down for you like a fraction"* in the hopes it would catch on in place of "unpack".

Didn't work.

(*RIP Bernie Mac)

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I cannot give this post agency.

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They used it a lot in a business class I took last year

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