The role of agency beliefs in transition: Commentary to the Special Section

These four papers together offer a fairly rare satisfaction, at least in the social sciences: First, they deal with the same general problem, the relationship between agentic beliefs and achievement, mostly educational or occupational. Second, the data are from different samples in different societies undergoing different kinds of sociopolitical and economic change and they are are analysed by a variety of methods. Finally, mirabile dictu, their findings agree on the general nature of the relationship between agency and achievement, namely, it is to a considerable degree reciprocal—agentic beliefs influence achievement, and achievement, especially success, influences agentic beliefs. In addition to demonstrating the generality of this effect, they present other findings that suggest basic similarities between rather different social systems. For instance, Schoon (2007, this issue) shows that a child’s education in the UK is largely determined by his/ her parents’ education. Despite 50 years of socialism, with its special laws making it easy for working-class children to enter university, this is just as true in Poland. To illustrate, Cichomski (2004) found that among citizens of Warsaw who only completed primary school, nearly half had fathers who also had no more than a primary school education, whereas less than 10% had fathers who were university graduates. Similarly, Diewald (2007, this issue) finds that agentic Germans see their successes as dispositional (due to personal effort and skill), and failures as situational (due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control), an effect that is observed in many different societies and that follows directly from attribution theory. Equally interesting are the cross-national differences. For example, Evans (2007, this issue) demonstrated that the level of educational and occupational success varies from one country to another depending on the range of different kinds of education and jobs the social system makes available to members; Schoon (2007, this issue) observed comparable differences in predictors of success as a function of the cohort. Taken together, these findings imply that in societies undergoing social change, cohort differences in achievement are likely because the range of opportunities afforded to individuals early in the process of change is different from that afforded later on. For instance, the best predictor of adult social status for disadvantaged individuals born in 1958 was their teenage educational aspirations; however, for disadvantaged youths born in 1970 the best predictor of adult social status was exam performance. This suggests that the former cohort had better opportunities; that is, a larger number of career options were available to these individuals, and thus, success depended less on the demonstration of academic competence than it did in the latter cohort. Under these conditions, processes mediating between individual agentic beliefs and educational or occupational outcomes may be critical in explaining cohort differences in the agency–achievement relationship. In Poland, for instance, the number of different kinds of schooling or careers available to individuals entering the labour market prior to the transition to a market economy was relatively small compared to the range available to those entering the labour market several years later after the transition. With this in mind we attempted to predict successful adaptation to the transition taking into