Agency and communion as a framework to understand consumer behavior

Abstract

In his seminal work, Bakan (1966) proposed agency and communion as two pillars of human personality – they describe how people are different from one another and how these differences influence individual and social desires. Agency represents a desire for independence and separation from other organisms; communion represents a striving for connection and unity with other organisms. They reflect personal and social motives that can conflict, cooperate, or merely coexist, depending on the context or the person. These intriguing constructs attracted a considerable amount of attention among psychologists, resulting in significant theoretical and empirical advancement over the last fifty years. Building on this large body of literature, consumer researchers have started to examine the role of these two dimensions of human personality in various issues, including consumers’ interactions with brands and other consumers in the marketplace. While doing so, they also contributed to the advancement of the agency-communion theory. The goal of this chapter is to review this nascent literature and identify fruitful research opportunities. Four sections comprise this chapter. The first section provides a broad summary of agency and communion and discusses their relation to key behavioral outcomes such as motivation, memory, and prosocial behavior. The second section outlines the current state of consumer research on agency and communion and summarizes key findings. The third section highlights some of the methodological issues pertaining to the use and operationalization of agency and communion in the consumer behavior literature. The last section lays the groundwork for future research.Agency and Communion Fundamentals Agency is about getting ahead. To be agentic is to be competent, independent, competitive, ambitious, in control, and power seeking. Communion is about getting along. To be communal is to be warm, honest, compassionate, agreeable, and generous (Bakan, 1966). Agency and communion serve their respective adaptive functions by profiting the self and others, respectively (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007; Cislak & Wojciszke, 2008; Peeters, 2008). Agency is self-profiting in that ambition, competence, and social power tend to directly gain the individual material wealth. Agency also has socially mediated benefits. In the eyes of others, agency is telling of a person's capacity for carrying out intentions. This perceived capacity earns agentic people respect and social status (Stopfer, Egloff, Nestler, & Back, 2013; Wojciske, Abele, & Baryla, 2009; cf. Carrier, Louet, Chauvin, & Rohmer, 2014) and passive facilitation (e.g., strategic associations; Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick. 2007, 2008)