Kerschbaum suggests that in considering agency we have to not just look at the actions of the speaker and the audience in terms of communicating and receiving communication, but also how agency should be considered in how audiences are or are not ready to interact with a concept based on social scripts around a concept. 

Kerschbaum's Theory of Rhetorical Agency as Interaction

Emergent Property is a term that means that a property comes about not from one of the parts of a being but from the interaction of those parts to create a whole.

Emergent Property

This definition is built on by Marilyn Cooper who posits that agency is a property of embodied beings interacting with each other, and that thus agency is shaped by consciousness in the way that individuals have goals, hopes, and can reflect on their own actions, but that the individual actions honed in on by rhetorical agency are still not intended. Additionally, since agency happens in our interactions with each other all actions have rhetorical and agentive rhetorical consequences. 

Rhetorical agency is a theory that posits that the world changes because of individual actions where individual is not often aware of their intention.

Rhetorical Agency

Cooper, M. M. (2011). Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted. College Composition and Communication, 62(3), 420–449. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27917907

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