This shifts the focus of the discussion in interesting ways from my
original emphasis on coercion as the prime differentiator between formal
and informal settings for learning. We take further steps toward asking
what kinds of coercivity matter in different settings, and what the
implications are of the fact that we are always travelling between settings
and from one community's lifeways to another's.
Sara's first example seems to illustrate best my original point: the people
making the decisions belong to activity worlds that may intersect with the
worlds where the decisions apply, but the length of the chains of
connections, and the nature of those connections (their de facto asymmetry
of power and communication) seems to mean that democracy, and often good
decision-making, have been lost through our wrong solutions to the problems
of scale. The assistant commisioner wields power and influence at the table
because of his/her participation in other networks of activity where
longer-term, wider-scale social processes (elections and appointments,
statistical data-gathering, tax revenue collecting, budget document
writing) are crystallized into semiotic artifacts (data tables, budgets,
minutes of meetings) that create links across many levels of scale: from
the big-scale, long network processes to the small-scale short network
ones; from what his/her commission depends on for its powerbase, to actual
minute-to-minute human scale activities. The assistant commissioner
her/himself becomes such an object (a special kind of 'boundary object'),
circulating between primary commission activities and other activities like
the curriculum committee. Traditional sociology recognizes that
institutional power usually inheres in roles rather than in persons as
such, but tends to miss the ways in which people serve as the material
links between different institutions, and what happens as power migrates in
the body of a person, from institution to institution, or setting to
setting, or community to community. Particularly in the very important case
where the settings belong to activity networks in which processes on very
different social-ecological scales take place.
Both Sara and the commissioner circulate among some of the same settings,
but the commisioner, more than Sara, is also a cross-scale object/actant.
(This oversimplifies a lot; what matters is how the processes on the
different scales are articulated through this actant and his/her actions,
which depends on the affordances of the settings, and the strategies of the
actor, as well as what processes are linked.)
The newsletter can help, because it links Sara into another higher scale,
longer-network system of processes. Crudely, it is a potential source of
power (cf. the teacher newsletter in Chicago that made the city's
superficial tests public), but more fundamentally it creates new linkages,
new interdependencies, and it crosses scales ... note that the newspaper
itself as a semiotic artifact links the activity on the shorter and more
local timescale of reading it, discussing it, waving it at a public meeting
... to the activity on the longer and more extended scale of gathering the
information in it, publishing and distributing it ... and in effect creates
correlations among the activities of different readers, groups, etc.
And consider Sara herself as such an artifact/actant ... her account is
well aware of how she has become a unique intersection of different roles,
migrating between her worlds, and so potentially creating linkages among
them (will she make an academic counter-argument to a burocratic discourse
in the meeting? will she bring her firsthand knowledge of families in the
community to bear in a curriculum meeting?). Her dilemmas are recognized by
others in our discussion who note how the norms of different _settings_
tend to restrict us in what seems appropriate to say, or who may speak, or
what kind of discourse is legitimate there. There is implicit coercivity in
social norms and value assignments (cf. Bourdieu on capital in different
fields), and also more explicit "silencing" when these norms are broken, or
just when someone with positional power uses it to back their interest. To
what extent should we learn to do as the Romans when in their city, and to
what extent should we announce that since we are here, it is our city, too,
and we do things differently? To what extent should we learn to follow, and
to what extent should we learn in order to lead in new directions?
JAY.
PS. Stan Salthe, a pioneer in the analysis of levels of scale in complex
systems, is quite active on the research scene (though retired from
teaching); he and I are giving papers in Gent in May on this subject.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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