Your comment about institutional mediated mind is put well in order.
It is helpful to extend the concept for us.
However, I have one question about your comment as follows;
>I was reading
>your description of what occurs in school, and it seems to me that this
>is purposeful. The society is training the individual to find motive and
>goal in the institution at a very early age.
I do not think the student's acts are not regulated intentionally or
purposefully
by them. Of course, the teacher wanted each student a school-socialized
person in the classroom and ordered several trivial(from my point of view)
matters,
and the students responded to the order and gradually be one type of
STUDENT. But
their acts were controlled as a habit more than the teacher expected. Who is
a controller for the students? 'Purposeful' means there are two candidates of
the controller. One is a teacher, the other is a student his/herself. But
I think
there are no one to control actually. As the prisonner in a panopticon does not
regulate and are not regulated by an actual person, the student in a
classroom not.
In a sense, they are regulated by someone who are not actual persons so that
the tool of the concept 'institution' is necessary for activity theory. In
other
sense, they act naturally in the community against their intention. The act
sinks into student's body there. Their acts alienate students themselves.
I think this phenomenan need to develop the concept of motive loosely defined by
Leont'ev. This discussion is tied up with the concept of internalization
and gives
a good chance to reconsider the concept of development and socialization in
community of practice.
Sorry to explain badly for xmcaers.
Thank you for nice talking.
At 10:21 AM 95.9.20 -0500, HDCS6 who-is-at Jetson.UH.EDU wrote:
>Hiroaki,
>
>I too have become very interested in the idea of what you call
>institution mediated mind. There are two places where I have found
>some important ideas on this subject. In the last section of
>Leontiev's book _
>Activity, Consciousness, and Personality_ he suggests that the individual
>in a complex society understands his or her own activity in terms of
>the larger social institutions. The complexity of the social system,
>and the complexity of the work involved in surviving the social system
>forces individual motives into the deep background. Motives such as
>attaining food still drive our activity, but there are so many social
>layers over it that we no longer recognize it. Thus we find ourselves
>on an assembly line, taking the motive from the institution, that we
>have to do a good job in order to keep our job. The distance between
>why we do things, and what we actually do is enormous. I was reading
>your description of what occurs in school, and it seems to me that this
>is purposeful. The society is training the individual to find motive and
>goal in the institution at a very early age. A second place where I
>have found interesting ideas on the institution mediated mind is in
>the second volume of Habermas's -Theory of Communicative Action-. He
>talks about how we are forced, through the sheer weight of complexity
>(I think it is very similar to Leontiev) to turn over our important
>decisions to institutions created by the social organization to make
>those decisions. The issues behind going to war are so complex for
>the individual we turn them over to a military establishment. The
>issues behind morality so complex we turn them over to a legal
>establishment. We knowingly allow institutions to take these roles
>in our lives.
>
>Michael Glassman
>University of Housotn
=============================================================
H I R O A K I I S H I G U R O
Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education,
Miyagi University of Education
Aramaki Aza Aoba, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980 Japan
Phone/Fax:022-214-3523 E-mail :h-ishi who-is-at ipc.miyakyo-u.ac.jp
=============================================================