In an agency relation, a person or group comes to stand in for, represent, act as an ally for, act on behalf of, or have delegated to them the task of another person or group. Thereby, humans become agents of other humans, a clear instance of relationality. Grounded in pragmatist and processual accounts of action, with affinities for hermeneutic institutionalism, but with an eye to the emergence of rigidified chains and blocs of power, the study of agency relations in sociology, and specifically the currently emerging theory of agency relations known as Rector-Actor-Other theory, is positioned as a counterpoint to two tendencies in social theory. First, the conception of agency as will, self-determination, and resistance is, while not rejected, contextualized via the examination of the proliferation of agency chains, especially in the late modern world. Second, the neoclassical, rational choice account of “principal” and “agent” is repurposed and replaced by an emphasis on the simultaneously material, connective, discursive, and performative dimensions of this relation. Special attention is paid to every instance in which a rector (R) turns an actor into an agent (A), and thereby ignores or excludes others (O), and is also a moment in which these actions and reactions are represented as such; to study agency relations is, then, to activate the double hermeneutic of sociological analysis.