>
>what am i asking, bill? do you know? how can a person maintain a
>particular conscience
>and still participate in an institution? and if compromises are expected,
>what is the effect of compromising in these kinds of communities?
>
>when you say "systemic" i understand this to mean "discursive" as in
>everywhere and nowhere, embodied and interacting,
>objective-subjective-interjective-transjective - transcending conscious
>"will" and becoming "habits" of normal-institutional-activity... and so on.
Such pressure! I guess I can deal with the brainiac business if you can wear the army boots... but the latter *is* self initiated...
A provisional response is that I'm looking at someone who balances her personal ideals with institutional work. Pure conjecture: what I think I see is that such a successful person really ...listens... to the other people (even as others, they are people who are to be respected regardless of the impersonal institution they enact) who constitute the institution. What comes of a juxtaposition of Bandura with chat so far, are the recognitions of the processes of building trust, of building a shared sense of efficacy, and these seem to come through a history of joint achievement. It's not magic, it just doesn't appear. Years go by. Compromise seems to be a process of establishing new relationships between the subject and the institution. (Such as taking on a new role that others deem appropriate, but which are not in one's prior plans.) And both individual and institution come to be changed together. By systemic, what I mean can be defined through chat as inclusive of subject-artifact-object-rules-DL... and this seems to work well for an long-lived, well established institution.
But also comes this caveat of how idiosyncratic is individual development as, from one person to the next, life experience and its uptake is highly variable. But one can't extrapolate that what works for one will necessarily work for another. And as a sidebar, the category of "individual development", as the embodiment of this unique cultural-historical shaping of one person, seems to be important in avoiding the oversimplification of social-reductionism. We're just not all the same are we?
bb
-- Bill Barowy, Associate Professor Lesley University 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790 Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169 http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html _______________________ "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful." [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 01:01:57 PDT