micro, macro, more

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sat, 06 Jan 96 00:25:42 EST

Eugene describes the emergent nature of good interpretive
research, and uses this as a basis for optimism that we can
overcome methodological problems inherent in the limitations of
purely 'micro' or situation-defined data.

He points out how the course of thoughtful research tends to
redefine the objects and extend the focus of attention of our
work. For him this means that the inherently arbitrary, fuzzy,
and permeable boundaries of what we define as 'the phenomenon' of
interest allow us to escape the limits of the local and gradually
extend our purview more globally.

So far as he goes, I certainly agree. But I still think that the
movement from local to local, even looking at links of the first
to the second and each later one, will still miss (or already
presuppose) important connections and perspectives that
characteristically come from non-local ways of conceptualizing
social phenomena.

I did not expect Eugene (or anyone really) to respond to my
gender and phone conversations example. I picked it to make
allusion to the most famous of all ethnomethodological studies,
and because the issue came up when a colleague was planning a
discourse analysis project on a different sort of conversation a
year or two ago. If I apply the same sort of argument to the case
Eugene describes from his own work with Barbara Rogoff, I would
think about the limitations of the locally-defined nature of the
phenomenon and the data being gathered. If it is 'how students
learn to work collaboratively in the classroom' and the data is
from classrooms, and involves teachers and parents, then I am
sure that Eugene and Barbara must have also considered the
potential relevance of other sites and activities: How do
students learn to play collaboratively outside the classroom? in
the home? with parents in the home? How did the parents, and the
teachers, come to acquire the views they have about learning,
about collaboration, about responsibility, individual vs group
projects, accountability and output? ways of teaching? What
happens in these activities and situations?

And if we follow these links to such other situations and
activities (which links should we follow? why? why do they even
occur to us as relevant?), will we not perhaps begin to see other
relevant dimensions of similarity and difference: between homes,
families, play groups, teacher's and parents' own school and
educational experiences and contexts? How far do we have to go
before we begin to use some more macro-social or global-
perspective notions _like_ age-group culture, social class
difference, culture- or gender- specific habitus in order to
structure the relations across different activities, different
participants, different philosophies of practice?

Of course most of us already have such more socially global
concepts as tools that we have found useful (and discovered the
limitations of) in the past. We use them to imagine possibly
relevant factors, potentially revealing comparisons, putative
linkages to other activities. And hopefully we also modify and
refine these notions as we adapt them to new studies.

Insofar as there is a practical methodological problem here, it
can be as simple as which of these different activities and sites
will we collect data on, in addition to our original focal site
of interest? Of course in practice we may go step by step, and
different researchers will extend their work along different
lines of linkage in the networks. But I am not sure that even
describing each activity in each site, and its interdependencies
with other activities in other sites, can be enough to get a
global or adequate conceptualization of social phenomena. There
is something more. And it is very important. At the moment I
conceptualize it in terms of the self-organizing dynamics of such
a network of interconnections, the emergent larger-scale
properties of the network as a whole, which can never be
described in purely local terms, though these properties have
their local 'aspect' inevitably.

When researchers took the methods, such as micro-ethnography and
discourse analysis, that had given such detailed descriptions of
classrooms, and extended them to students' homes and the
community, and then sought to see the interdependencies among all
these sites and their activities, the most salient features of
their conclusions were framed in more macro-social terms: class
differences, ethnic culture differences, sociolects, dialects,
gender norms, etc. Granted these are very crude concepts still,
much in need of critique and refinement, but they capture
something of interest that may become salient in single sites and
activities only when comparisons across different ones has
already directed our attention to it. JAY.

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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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