Here is what Naoki wrote:
At 4:51 PM 11/22/97 -0800, Mike Cole wrote:
>Diane writes:
>How do you see "large-scale processes" affecting (effecting?) events
>on shorter-than-'normal' time scales?
Mike,
I always have difficult time to read the description like above.
*** I was drawing in my question on the prior discussion. Taken in isolation, my
question is not helpful. Perhaps, as you suggest below, it would not be helpful given
all the contextualization that the internet could permit.
My questions are as follows;
1. Micro-(meso)-macro dichotomy is really produtive?
***** To begin with, we are not discussing a dichotomy, nor a trichotomy. The specific
theoretical framework I work from finds it useful to consider human behavior as the emergent
product of interactions on several time scales. These time scales are of course, abstractions and have
to be grounded. I tried to ground them in *Cultural Psychology*. For example, I believe that there
are important differences between phylogenetic change and cultural-historical change related both
to temporality and teleology. Perhaps I did it poorly. But I believe that it was useful. When/if a more
useful way of doing it is proposed, I will gladly adopt it.
For example, the analysis of 15 seconds social interaction
cannot be necessarily regarded as "micro" analysis.
"Micro" analysis often includes "macro" viewpoint although it
depends on what one analyses 15 seconds interaction.
So, it seems to me that we should radically reconsider what is micro,
macro, meso.
***** I believe that every time we do an analysis we have to consider carefully how we specify what
we mean by levels and their time characteristics, since whatever levels we come up with can only
be specified relationally. I fully agree that "15 secs of social interaction cannot be
necessarily regarded as "micro" analysis." I am very interested in processes that occur during sacadic
eye movements, which take a lot shorter time than 15 secs. Yet it does not disturb me to refer to a
15 minute sequences of interactions, studied second by second, as "micro" vis a vis the sequence of
changes that have occurred in the local Boys and Girls Club over the past 10 years.
It is worth asking that the analysis of 15 seconds and of 1 year
are really different?
***** I have never tried to ask this question. I assume it would depend very much on the purposes
of the analysis, the objects being analyzed, etc. I have found, however, that there are some
fascinating analogies (perhaps even homologies) between events that occur over a period
of weeks among three three institutions in a town where we have 5thDimensions and
events that occur in the course of a 30-45 minute interaction between a child and an undergraduate
in one of those institutions. The way that interactions provide material for appropriation,
and the importance of the timing of the appropriated materials with respect to the interaction
provides one example.
2. Is macro given?
***** Not according to anything I have said. However, it is often taken as given by participants and
especially by novice participants (who often dutifully participate in its reproduction). It is often
given by convention in sociological debates, which seems to be the interpretive context for your
commentary.
I do not straightly understand the term such as "macro(meso)
social structure" and "large-scale processes".
Rather, always I would like to ask "macro or large-scale processes
is whose agenda?".
***** Seems like we agree here. The terms take on meaning in use.
So, before discussing the affective relation among micro, macro,
meso, I am interested in how practioners and scientists
are making observable of "macro" or "large scale" by using various
resources or artifacts and in how "macro" or "large-scale processes"
is used and embedded in practice.
****** Again, we agree. How is a Boys and Girls Club's "macroness" made manifest with respect
to a specific activity setting that is said to be "within it" (such as a 5thD?). How does a 5thD do the
same with respect to an interaction that occurs "within" it? What does "within" mean? How is it
accomplished? We are trying to study such issues. We do not pretend to have an external place from
which to pronounce, although we probably fall into the trap of doing that often.
In this context, I can paraprase the following G. H. Mead's phrase.
'When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then
was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could,
that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place,
he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present
within which that use must take place. A string of presents conceivably
existing as presents would not constitute a past.'(Mead, p.30)
*****
I really love Mead's reflections on time and have been inspired by you to go back to
them. The experience that led me to think of the term "mesogenetic" came from
an experience that echoes Mead, but differs from it. It is written up in some detail
in the paper in Martin et al book on Sociocultural theory honoring Sylvia Scribner, and in
checking I see that I did not cite it in *Cultural Psychology*. The experience was one of
writing a report about the first several years of trying to sustain 5thD's in Solana Beach.
Of course, when I started the report, I had a nicely built up explanation for why things
had turned out as they did. As part one of my research methods, I had tape recorded
conversations with key institutional players in four institutions where the 5thD was started.
When I listened to those tapes 5 years later, I was shocked because I could now "see" the future in
a way that the Mike Cole I was listening to talk with people on the tape could not. I could from "the
future" occupy a particular "past" and the second time around I could interpret remarks that people
made in a totally different light. I could discriminate statements with long term import from ones
without it.
None of this invalidates what Mead wrote, but for me, at least, it enriches it. Thanks
to the tape recorder, which did not exist in Mead's time, I could see time, so to speak, from
two sides. Thanks to film and video, a Garfinkel, Sachs, Ueno, McDermott, Suchman, etc.
can interact with the phenomena they study in brief time segments. Etc.
The activity systems I have been studying have socio-culturally constrained periodicity that
is made up of the convergence of many constraints operating on lots of time scales all at once. There
is the school year, the calander year, the quarter system of the university, the schedules of the
individual students, researchers, and children, the summer vacation, etc. I see "three generations"
of 5thD's every year because we are on a quarter system here. My colleagues at Appalachian state
see 2, they are on a semester sysetem. The various artifacts we use in the different 5thD's have
wildly different half lives, as well as wildly different material instantions in local practices. Etc.
So, for my purposes, the use of "mesogenetic" is useful. In indexes a time scale that
is socially embodied, routinely experienced, and discriminable from other time scales I am interested
in (such as the time involved in a child mastering some ecology concepts over the course
of two weeks, made up of half a dozen one hour sessions, which are punctuated by a variety of
events, etc.).
Finally, I found it interesting that time is not mentioned in Naoki's interesting rephrasing of
Mead:
'When one recalls his macro social structure or large scale
process, he cannot get into them as it then
was, without their relationship to what his present practice has become
; and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the macro or large scale
as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not
being in the present practice within which that use must take place.
........................"
History is not like the given natural environment.
(of course the "given natural environment" is actually not given)
**** History is culture in the present
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