I appreciate Jay your comments on the limitations of either only looking at
local situations or only looking at macro structures. To do a fair
critique of EM/CA, as you said, requires more work than can be conveyed in
a compressed message. I have tried to do it (you know I'm a critical
student) all through my student career... and in the process, I've found
that there's more to EM/CA than the usual critiques have been able to
capture. And yet, now... after all, :-) I think maybe we are just
looking at the same coin from the two different sides... no single theory
is an adequate tool for the analysis of the complex social and
educational phenomena we face... so, I very much appreciate your tool-kit
metaphor: we need many very different tools, tools that are
radically different :-) That's a very interesting point, and a very useful
one. Thanks!
I'm forwarding a communication of James Heap on the subject. I have
always had great respect for James' views. To be sure, he's an EM/CAist,
but in all my interactions with him, he's proven to be responsive to
others' views. EM/CA do not deny the relevance of macro social
structures, just that they won't take them for granted , and would always
try to look for concrete realizations of them. In this respect, I don't
think it's very different from Bourdieu's view on the agency of social
actors: we can reproduce or transform social structures... there are social
constraints, but social actors are not puppets of larger structures,
either. Oh well... I'll not be able to go further into it... not for the
time being... :-) happy new year (how many times i've said it now? :-)
Cheers,
Angel
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 22:05:39 -0500 (EST)
From: James L. Heap <jheap who-is-at oise.on.ca>
To: Angel Mei-Yi Lin <mylin who-is-at oise.on.ca>
Subject: Re: The link between "macro" and "micro"
Greetings,
Sorry it has taken a bit of time to get back to you. Here are my
thoughts on some of your questions and points:
1) Any work in EM/CA explicating negotiations of what counts as a lesson
or a job interview vs work on practices which "reproduce" [social
structure?].
I don't know of any work in EM/CA like this, but this is probably
because EM/CA doesn't take it that there is a class of actions called
"negotiations" which it could explicate. To borrow from Symbolic
Interactionism: all interaction is "negotiation." If EM/CA were serious
about negotiation, then it would look for it as a members' phenomenon, as
something members orient to and recognizably produce/do. "Negotiation"
and "Reproduction" are analyst phenomena.
2) Talk of macro structures and entry points for change which the
analyst can see is clearly analyst talk. It requires and presupposes
stable social structures "out there." And while CA will give a nod of
approval to the claim that [whatever] social structure [is, it] is
locally accomplished, it and EM will NOT buy that there are SOME social
structures which "are really objectively out there, e.g., institutional
rules, contraints." Read Heritage's chapter on rules and accounts in his
book on EM. Rules are not "out there" independently of parties to a
setting orienting to them; that they are "out there" is a JUDGMENT of
someone. [If they are "out there" where are they? Are they outside
individuals? Can they be located? How far can one take the metaphor of
spatial location of ideal/irreal objects? THis is NOT to say that we do
not experience rules as external and constraining, it is only to quibble
with the formulation that they "are really objectively out there."]
3) talk of "forces leading to...change" turns on an epistemic standpoint
outside local situations. CA keeps the focus "inside" the situation, as
you know; that's its limit. The question is how to overcome that limit
without losing the standpoint from which CA's phenomena becomes visible.
4) Can local practices change social structure? Yes, as a change in what
parties to a setting take the social structure to be now, as oppposed to
before. But what kind of practices are you talking about? Lots of
things can be called practices, but not everything that other folk, e.g.,
in critical pedagogy, have the concrete observability of what CA calls a
practice. You need to be clear on what you are wanting to call a
practice; you may need to make distinctions between kinds of practice, as
levels of abstraction. As well, you need to clear on what you mean by
social structure [you do seem clear on this: rules/norms; there are other
definitions, e.g, role relations, as when we talk about the family as a
social structure {but these relations can be rewritten as rules, but not
any set of rules would be a social structure under this view}].
5) A longitudinal study of changes in social structure, as achieved by
changes in local practices, is an interesting possibility, depending on
what you mean by social structure and practices.
Cheers,
James