I think you comment that we are moving to another unit of
analysis is quite accurate. And there are many implications. One of
them is that it makes easier to explore the observation that many of our
needs, desires, motivations, and activities are social in nature--that
is, not just socially enabled (as when someone helps us lift a heavy box,
or provides us in words a procedure for lifting the box without injuring
our back, or lets us know the name of a class of pain relieving drugs
that we can get over the counter) butactually social in their end--as in
our talking with each other to share thoughts, as in our need to be
recognized by at least one other as decent, as in our need to feel at
home among others. Further this opens up the realm of our having an
active and continuing interest in particular others and groups of others
(interest in several of its multiple meanings)--these are the kinds of
things usually referred to by that myustical and somewhat obscure word
bonding. Further it opens up issues of our accommodation to what we
perceive as social/cultural/public practices in order to partake in the
group activities and perhaps even just to be acceptable as a member in
the group so as to be eligible to participate in activities, which in
turn opens up issues of ourselves acting as and seeing ourselves and
beeing seen by others as belonging to dyads, groups, and other
affiliations--all of which become part of our cognitive activity
structure. This, of course, is all rather old-hat stuff of social
psychology--but having activity accounts of such phenomena might be
quite enlightening.
Similarly when we step up to larger groupings, perhaps supported
by long traditions, regulation, economic or governmental power, real
estate holdings, and so on, other phenomena of affilaition,
participation, orientation, expectation, habit, and activity enter in.
Activity theory provides an interesting basis on which to build a
micro-participative analysis of such macro-institutions--one that
respects theJvndividuality of each person's motivation, cognition and
participation while still recognizing the orientation to and
accomplishment of larger social formations.
Actor network theory provides useful accounts of some phenomena,
particularly highlighting 1) the multiplicity of links we may have, and thus
the multiplicity of orientations that influence our activities, 2) the
way in which certain individuals can seek to have others orient to them
and thus satisfy some of their needs through a variety of
power-aggregating and organizing devices and 3) the way in which material
objects (particularly designed, technologically produced objects can
serve to organize behaviors and orientations of individuals and groups.
However, I think, moving the unti of analysis from the isolated
individual in action, even the separable individual in interaction with
oter seperable individuals, to individuals participating together in
groups opens up far more issues than are encompassed in actor network
theory--and thus call on a wide range of the conceptual tools developed
in many schools of social science.
There is an old phrase in philosophy of science, "saving the
phenomenon," to which is attributed two meanings. One is the ad hoc
attempt to save an outdated account, in the manner of epicycles to save
the earth-centered heavens. The other meaning is that every new theory
that comes along should be able to account for all existing phenomena
observed, recognized, and accounted for through prior theories--that
heliocentric accounts still needed to account for all the planetary
positions observed under the previous regime, and that relativistic
physics had to provide adequate accounts of all newtonian -phenomena. I
think it may be heuristically rather exciting to take this latter
meaning as a guideline in viewing through activity theory the social
phenomena observed by others from other perspectives. Some phenomena may
indeed evaporate under an activity gaze, but then at least we ought to be
able to give an account of something that might liook very similar to the
evaporated phenomenon, or at least why such apparitions might appear to
others looking through their antiquated lenses.
Chuck Bazerman
On Sat, 23 Sep 1995, Jay Lemke wrote:
>
> I am quite fascinated by the issues raised here recently by
> Hiroaki Ishiguro and others concerning institutional mediation of
> identity and activity. It seems to me that what is being proposed
> is a profound adjustment to the 'unit of analysis'. It is a
> logical next step, which perhaps activity theorists have already
> implicitly taken but maybe not yet sufficiently articulated,
> beyond the basic view of individual-in-context. The first step
> was simply to stop taking the individual as an isolable unit, to
> challenge in effect the assumption that what is invariant about
> an individual from situation to situation (these invariants are
> themselves cultural constructions) is also what is crucially
> important for their behavior in each situation. Or the assumption
> that these invariants give a complete model, sufficient to
> understand how the individual behaves in any situation (insofar
> as it can be understood). The first step in activity theory, or
> situated cognition theory, is to say, no, the unit is the
> situated-individual or the individual-in-activity, and invariants
> across activities or situations are not sufficient.
>
> >From the viewpoint of traditional notions, this is much the same
> as saying that we are different Selves in different situations or
> activities (that we can be seen as such, just as we can be seen
> in some other respects as the same from one to another).
>
> But the first step really only considers one situation or
> activity at a time, it is local and microsocial in nature. Yes,
> we bring in the macrosocial and the historical and cultural
> dimensions in terms of our accounts of the origin and nature of
> the kinds of situations and activities that exist in a community
> (and so the kinds of identities and behavior patterns, and
> individuals, it produces). But we do not usually extend the unit
> itself to higher levels of social organization than the local
> situation, the immediate activity.
>
> Much the same thing has been true in discourse analysis, and a
> great change has come recently because of the growing emphasis on
> 'intertextuality' -- on the notion that the meaning here in this
> text also depends on relationships with other texts.
>
> Can we interpret an institutionally-mediated notion of person,
> self, identity, behavior in similar terms? I think we can if we
> also use something like Latour's actor-network model for our view
> of what an institution is. Traditional sociological notions about
> institutions often simply reify abstractions (the family is an
> institution, but so is the English language), or they get lost in
> 'the middle range' between macrosocial categories and microsocial
> interactions. Latour gives a 'bottom up' view of institutions in
> terms of the networks of interdependent activities that
> constitute them (e.g. scientific disciplines, natural history
> museums, research laboratories, etc.). This view enables us to
> say _which_ other activities belong to the same 'institutional
> network', and _how_ they are connected. These are the same two
> things one needs for a theory of intertextuality (which other
> texts are relevant, and how).
>
> Now we can say that an individual can be defined, analysed,
> traced, described, theorized, etc. not just in relation to each
> immediate situation or activity, and NOT in terms of some
> ideology of invariant features across all possible activities,
> but specifically in terms of self-construction and participation
> in a _set_ of interlinked activities, where the linking is
> precisely that defined by the constitution of a particular
> institution. In this way we can get a useful notion (and
> researchable method) of a 'family-individual', a 'school-
> individual', a 'laboratory-individual' etc. These might all be
> construable as 'the same' individual at another level of analysis
> (what level? the societal-individual level?), but clearly they
> represent something much closer to what many of us want to study
> than does either the 'all-purpose individual' (which probably
> exists only at so high a level of abstraction as to rather
> useless, unless reconceived) or the 'activity-specific
> individual' (even if defined in relation to a _type_ of activity,
> rather than a particular activity-event; institutions consist of
> heterogeneous networks of many types of activity). I think such a
> notion represents a considerable advance over both traditional
> role theory and our existing notions of individuals in units of
> analysis.
>
> JAY.
>
> PS. Note, depending on your way of defining 'activity', that even
> if we take an activity to be an extended set of actions unified
> by a common purpose, or as a common social-cultural formation
> (getting closer to Latour), an activity-network model will
> generally include many such 'activities' as part of what defines
> an institution and so what may define an institutional-individual
> (and his/her institution-mediated participation in particular
> specifically institutional activities).
>
> ---------------
>
>
> JAY LEMKE.
> City University of New York.
> BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
> INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>
>