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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Multifaceted Nature of Agency and Professional Learning

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The present volume has aimed to cover a broad range of approaches to agency at work, exploring its relationship with professional learning and development. Thus, the chapters included in this book have discussed the role of agency in learning and development, considering a variety of working life contexts and applying both conceptual and empirical perspectives. This final chapter provides an overview of both the conceptual approaches and the empirical implementations. We see the perspectives as complementary. From the content of the book, we discern the phenomena as falling on two main dimensions, clustering at opposite ends of these dimensions. Thus, the following contrasts are evidenced: (a) agency understood as a personal capacity, vs. agency as behaviour, and (b) agency as an individual phenomenon, vs. agency as a collective phenomenon. All the chapters emphasise that agency is needed for learning and development. However, they differ in how they view the relationships between the concepts. They also exhibit differences in the empirical decisions taken and the research strategies chosen. In this concluding chapter, we discuss the main similarities and differences emerging from the chapters. We also highlight avenues for future research on agency and its relationship with professional learning.