Agency and Power Across Biological Scales: A Framework for Cross-Scale Analysis

Power is control of controllers — the capacity to reliably steer another agent's action by acting on the variables that govern its action selection. This paper develops a graded framework for agency and power that applies uniformly from bacteria to human institutions.

Agency admits degrees: a system is an agent to the extent it maintains internal states representing self/environment and uses them to guide action selection. Power operates through two routes: representation-mediated (manipulating perception and values) and constraint/controller-hijack (limiting action sets or modifying control systems directly).

The same mechanisms trace continuously from quorum sensing in bacteria, through parasitic manipulation in insects, to prestige and coercion in human societies. "Demi-agents" like corporations present agent-like interfaces but outsource their decision-making to constituent minds.