Re: levels of analysis/objective phenomena?

Arne Raeithel (raeithel who-is-at informatik.uni-hamburg.de)
Wed, 24 Apr 1996 06:28:22 +0200

King, first I have to make sure that I understand this:

>To assume that levels of developmental organization are in the eye of the
>researcher has the strange and unintended effect of exempting the
>researcher and the research enterprise from being a CHAT
>(cultural-historical activity theory) system, something that Latour
>explicitly argues against in *Laboratory Life* and elsewhere.

I read this with an example in mind, namely one of the big Gesamtschulen
(comprehensive schools, i.e. *not* one of the "stratified", traditional
German schools: Gymnasium, Realschule, Hauptschule) in some of our federal
states here. In the seventies, during and after Willi Brandt's
chancellorship, many were founded as really *big* institutions, around
a thousand students, in big concrete-and-glass buildings. Teachers then
were young and enthusiastic. Nowadays, the buildings look dirty by them-
selves, and because of so-called Vandalism, and lack of money. Many
teachers turned into burnt-out cynics, a lot of violence is visible for
the outside visitor.

Now, if a research group comes and looks at the several levels of
self-regulation (including violent conflict) of this community of
practice as if the researchers themselves were free to draw the
boundaries between individuals, peer-groups, teacher/student coalitions,
administration subgroups, age/class strata among students, then the
researchers free themselves from the burden of looking at the
boundaries as historically grounded, made by the people and artifacts
themselves. Thereby, they also put themselves in a limbo, a precarious
observation point with no real connection to the community under
study.

Is that what you wanted to say? Going from this, I add that the ways
how the members of this big school look at their own collective practice
make a big difference in the reality (e.g. the resistance against
change) of the respective levels. The fascinating thing about social
systems is that the so-called subjective views are objectively existing
factors at the same time, and there is a "positive feedback loop"
between views and reality, despite the naming often with negative
consequences. On the other hand, reform of any kind is only successful
if the prophecy inherent in the reform goals is indeed self-fulfilling,
if a positive positive feedback loop (self-amplification) can be
made to operate...

The art of school administration therefore should be a big topic in
educational research, but I don't know of any, I must confess.
Now being in the consulting business for industry and commerce,
instead of at the departement of psychology of a university, I have
seen that also in work and organization psychology there is nearly
nothing known about the activity of leadership and management
that would help those persons understand their object of work,
the "counter processes" going on in the organization in an autonomous
way. There are only some obscure theories of how individual actors
orient themselves in their surroundings, these not even depicted
as cultural contexts (the so-called "social psychology")...

Therefore, I wholeheartedly agree with your agenda:

>... Given that education (and the Politics to
>which you refer) involves in some sense a transformation of the "ought" to
>"is," we need to understand the processes by which tensions embodying
>different levels of organization manifest and resolve over time.

In the CHAT inspired research I know of, much was done on the shop
floor level, and also on several between level conflict scenarios.
It may very well be that the ideological climate forbade research
into leadership and management activity on both sides of the former
iron curtain. In Germany, journals for teachers and educational
researchers often carried cartoons showing a big sign-post at some
entrance gate to a production plant saying: "end of the democratic
sector" (alluding, of course to the big signs in West-Berlin, an
interesting double or triple irony). It seems to me that by viewing
reality in this way, we *made it* more like our view suggested.

Today, the most interesting and vigourous democratization processes
in Germany happen inside the industrial fences, while the former
young state institutions like the Gesamtschulen have crystallized
into immobile, over-aged communities struggling with understanding
today's young ones, so different than they used to be...

This being alread much too long, I'll simply stop here: Arne.