Beyond personal agency in entrepreneurship: transcendent proxy agency as an ontological expansion of social cognitive theory
本文提出超越性代理（TPA）作为社会认知理论的本体论扩展，解释创业者如何在不确定性中通过与外部强化（包括神圣代理）对齐来维持行动或停止，为理解宗教在创业中的作用提供了新框架。
This paper introduces Transcendent Proxy Agency (TPA) as an ontological expansion of Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), offering a psychologically pluralistic account of entrepreneurial engagement. While SCT has traditionally emphasized personal agency, we argue that sustained action, or purposeful cessation, in contexts of uncertainty depends on agentic alignment with external reinforcement. We distinguish between socially mediated proxy agency (mentors, institutions) and transcendent proxy agency, defined as the perceived relationship with a Sovereign Agent. We theorize the latter as a dual-natured mechanism that provides both motivational scaffolding and sovereign constraints. Drawing on the Islamic tradition as an illustrative case, we demonstrate how TPA reconfigures commitment through a Dual Logic of Agency: balancing rigorous mastery over means (Asbāb) with a metaphysical decoupling from outcomes (Qadar) as a normative ideal. This approach reveals how religious agency can facilitate resilience in the face of trial and a morally grounded productive exit when ventures conflict with perceived divine stewardship (Amānah), while acknowledging that its enactment is effortful, variable, and marked by oscillation between trust and doubt. By integrating transcendent influence into the architecture of agency, this paper moves beyond individualist, secular paradigms to offer a relational and context-sensitive framework for understanding entrepreneurial behaviour in socio-cultural environments.