But one thing I don't believe is that individuals can directly interact
with groups as groups. This is why it is so important and difficult to
spell out just how connections across levels of analysis function in social
systems.
There may be some good particular analyses of particular cases, but I don't
think anybody has yet come near a useful general model ... there are bits
and pieces ... and maybe we don't have to fit them all into a single
coherent model -- I don't think we do -- but there are not even enough bits
and pieces at this point to give us a repertory of analytical strategies
that will be useful in any substantial percentage of new cases.
Sociocultural theory and symbolic interactionism (and, yes,
ethnomethodology and structuration theory) all seem so O-L-D at this point.
None of them have really assimilated the critiques of the
post-structuralist/post-modernist period, or integrated new insights from
the study of complex systems. (The same can be said, of course, of
cybernetics-like social systems theory and formalist semiotics.)
I know you are interested in connectionism, which is more or less a branch
of the new complex system paradigm (emergence theory), but as much an
advance as that may represent in terms of learning models, we have to think
about how to integrate it (or at least articulate it) with emergentist
social system models, and with the mediating kinds of analysis attempted in
AT and ANT.
Any ideas? next steps? exemplars of possibilities?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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