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ABSTRACTS
MCA Vol. 7, No. 3
Making Music with Cases: Symposium on the Work of Howard S. Becker
Susan Leigh Star, Editor
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
This MCA symposium continues our tradition of multidisciplinary
conversations about short contributions from senior scholars. Their
purpose is to broaden our shared base of reference as well as to
familiarize readers with the work of these scholars.
Howard Becker is a sociologist of work and practice, who in a long and
fruitful career has written about the work of schoolteachers, jazz
musicians, medical students, undergraduates, artists and actors, among
other groups. He has also written extensively about social science
methodology. A student of Chicago School sociologist Everett Hughes, he
shares the Chicago School-Pragmatist emphasis on egalitarian analyses,
empirical study, and understanding the 3definition of the situation2 as
developed by members of a social group. The titles of his books and
articles often indicate aspects of these commitments. "Doing Things
Together" (a selection of collected papers, 1986) talks about a range of
activities from map-making to jazz playing. "Boys in White" (1961) tells
about the socialization and tribulations of medical students. One of his
best-known works, "Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance"
(1963) was pivotal in establishing social theories of deviance that
refused to label any community of practice as 3sick2 or 3dysfunctional.2
Everyone is an outsider somewhere.
The symposium revolves around a short essay on the nature of
improvisation in jazz, especially drawing on Becker1s own experience as
a jazz musician in Saturday night pickup bands in Chicago in the 1940s
and 50s. Here, as in much of his work, Becker investigates the tensions
and affinities between rules and freedom, between membership and
outsider status, between credibility and rank. The comments are by Debra
Cash (an anthropologist and dance critic), Keith Sawyer (a psychologist
studying creativity and improvisation), and Karen Ruhelder (a computer
scientist and serious amateur choral conductor) and Fred Stolzfus (a
teacher of choral conducting in a prestigious university music
department). The conversation comes to replicate aspects of the
discussion about improvisation - including 3yes, and2 and 3no, but2
interchanges. The respondents use Becker1s jazz improvisation case to
extend the range of examples to other cases, improvisational theater and
dance, conducting, and everyday conversation.
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Mathematical Problems and Goals in Children1s Play of an Educational
Game
Steven R. Guberman
University of Colorado at Boulder
Geoffrey B. Saxe
University of California at Berkeley
In his development of activity theory, Leontiev explained that the
emergence of divisions of labor in society necessarily leads to
collaborative activity in which individuals, with their own goals and
actions, contribute to collective achievements. In this paper, we
describe emergent 3divisions of labor2 that are common in children1s
collective problem solving. Parallel to Leontiev1s argument, we show
that when labor becomes divided, children often become engaged in
accomplishing different goals leading to different learning outcomes. We
illustrate the utility of this analytic tack in analyses of 64 third and
fourth graders playing an educational game, Treasure Hunt.
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Imagination and Culture
What is it Like Being in the Cyberspace?
Giuseppe Mantovani and Anna Spagnolli
Department of General Psychology
University of Padova - Italy
New information technologies are constructing living and working
environments which people often find disorienting. This can be seen as a
general effect of the introduction of new artifacts which disrupt
pre-existing routines and destroy the previous distribution of work.
Communities have to cope with unprecedented environments by developing
imagination as a cultural resource, allowing them to make sense of the
ambiguous situations created by new computer technologies. New computer
artifacts alter not only the social fabric of the communities in which
they are adopted, but also the kind of relationships that tools once had
with human minds. Both processes, the appearance of uncharted
environments and the emergence of an "intimate" technology, emphasize
the function of semiotic mediation involved in artifact use. Making
sense of new environments (such as shared virtual environments designed
to support distant coworking) means making them part of the
socio-cultural network which maintains "real" communities and
reconfiguring in imaginative ways the existing socio- cultural networks.
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Self and Other in Bakhtin1s Early Philosophical Essays:
Prelude to a Theory of Prose Consciousness
Deborah Hicks
University of Cincinnati
The self is not a thing, a substrate, but the protagonist of a life1s
tale. The conception of selves who can be individuated prior to their
moral ends is incoherent. We could not know if such a being was a human
self, an angel, or the Holy Spirit. [Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self,
p. 162] "We think we are tracing the nature of the thing, but we are
only tracing the frame through which we view it." So writes Ludwig
Wittgenstein in "Philosophical Investigations," about processes of
social scientific inquiry. We interpretively read social events through
various disciplinary lenses; this is no less true of our readings of
theorists. My purpose in this reflective essay is to read the work of
Mikhail Bakhtin through an interpretive lens that differs somewhat from
the norm within contemporary sociocultural/historical theories of
psychology and education. My essay hinges on the argument that, among
sociocultural theorists, Bakhtin's work has tended to be aligned with
frameworks that focus more on social systems of activity and discourse.
Though Bakhtin's writings do address shared genres of discourse and
social action, his work also addresses another aspect of living and
learning. As they draw on mediated systems of social action and
discourse, individuals construct histories that are ethically
particular and attuned to moral ends. Dialogue, as depicted by Bakhtin,
entails a form of answerability that is morally responsive to unique
others and particular relationships. Considered outside of such moral
ends, social actions and discourses lose a crucial part of their
concreteness -- their embeddedness in relationships constituted by
thoughts, feelings, and histories between unique individuals. The
complex particulars of morally-imbued relationships have been oddly
missing from theoretical discourses about learning in social context.
Considered in their breadth, Bakhtin's writings offer a critical
alternative: A theory of discourse, selfhood, and social action that
draws heavily from moral philosophy and literature, and that places high
theoretical value on ethical particularity. His early philosophical
essays argue that discourse and action outside of morally imbued
relationships might be true of angels and spirits, but not of persons
engaged in historical moments of living.
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