I seem to be falling on the Giddens side of the discussion, Keith. I do find
"the constitution..." highly readable, and, for example, have paused where he
discusses "rules", as this section is useful to hold up against the "rules"
category expressed in yrjo's book. It looks like later on there is a
treatment of structural contradiction in a way that can also be contrasted to
LBE. From this perspective, since i apply the finnish flavor of chat to my
own studies, Giddens is highly relevant to the everyday. That's not to say
that i agree with everything -- far from it.
But the first thing i keep in mind with xmca discussions (i'm writing to
remind myself and clarify where i'm coming from -- not an admonishment-- I
think you describe the ontological/methodological distiction well.) is not to
confuse the map with the terrain. It seems as if the giddens-archer debate
is one in which terrain and map have become blurred with the assertion
"individual-group analysis IS inseparable" on the one side and the opposite
on the other. My emphasis is on what seems however, as i'm only on my second
giddens book, and am only taking second hand what is written about archer.
My own interest in the inseparability issue is to agree that, in the big
picture, there is good evidence to support the assertion that the actions and
change of an individual are inseparable from processes of the milieu. The
description of how that plays out in detail will require a lot of work -- and
we expect it to be context sensitive, with strong and weak couplings we have
yet to figure out. In a manner of speaking, school change is a response to
the issue of inseparability, on a practical plane. People have realized that
trying to make change in one or a few elements of schooling, for example
through teacher training, curriculum adoption, etc. has limited results.
There are children who learn effectively within schools and those that do not
, and there are many at various degrees of in between -- in a manner of
speaking this addresses the strong and weak coupling of the development of
individuals to their school contexts.
[aside] Now the interesting thing is that much of education treats children
with an assumption of some ontological separation -- that "knowing something"
is independent of context, yet, perhaps in contradiction, a lot of
educational research aims to manipulate the dimensions of learning contexts,
to optimize the coupling between individual learning and context. We invent
new software, we write new textbooks, we develop new teaching and classroom
management strategies, and so on.
So where i seem to be landing is on whether the differences between what
researchers do and what researchers think is a matter of making the finer
distinctions in inseparability -- that while, writ large, inseparability may
be inescapable -- its in the large grain -- the finer grain reveals
differences in degree and kind, and these are what emperical studies are
revealing. Giddens work is on the large grain, to mix metaphors - the big
features of the map, and consequently there are many places where there are
exceptions to what he writes.
The question i have is -- where in Giddens writing can i specifically find
treatments of strong/context-insensitive inseparability?
bb
On Monday 22 April 2002 17:38, Keith Sawyer wrote:
> Thanks Bill for letting me know the message didn't go to XMCA! I am
> reposting the original message so that everyone has it without the extra
> ">" that are inserted with forwarded messages. My apologies for the
> duplication.
>
> Bill Barowy wrote:
> >I'd like to place a marker on this discussion, to return later. I had
> >started reading Giddens "constitution..." just before aera, and having put
>
> it
>
> >on hold for a bit, i do not (yet) get the sense of his claiming a strong
> >inseparability therein. But perhaps with further reading... who knows?
> > All i can say is that Giddens make a lot of sense so far. Will that make
> > me an inseparabilitist? Eeek. Maybe I'm an "-ist" while trying not to
> > be.
>
> Giddens is incredibly difficult to read, and even more difficult to pin
> down as making any claims with obvious implications for empirical practice.
> He writes a lot of things that SOUND good; the problem is that when you
> spend the time to figure out exactly what he means, and what the
> implications are for social science practice, it doesn't sound so good (at
> least, not to me). He is so hard to figure out that at least some scholars
> have mistakenly concluded that his structuration theory is similar to, for
> example, Roy Bhaskar's critical realism, when in fact they contradict each
> other on key points (inseparability being one of them). Mike Cole in his
> 1996 book suggests his work is compatible with Giddens but again, in the
> "unresolved tensions" paper I claim Cole's approach is opposed to Giddens
> (at least on the separability issue) In general I am not sure that Giddens
> is worth the effort.
>
> >But (shooting from the hip, in lieu of required reading) one wonders
> > whether this strong/weak coupling is a matter of which activity one has
> > in mind.
>
> Why
>
> >should it be fixed that the social/cultural determination of the
> > individual is independent of context? Why should we argue this without a
> > particular grounded situation in mind?
>
> That's a good point. The degree of "separability" probably varies from one
> situation to another. For example, studying alone in the library, or using
> a map to figure out where you are when you're lost in the woods, are
> different (socioculturally) from a five-year-old helping his father to
> cook dinner, or a girl and her mother planning a girl-scout cookie delivery
> route. One might say the former are "less socially embedded" but most
> socioculturalists are resistant to such distinctions, because they want to
> make strong anti-psychology claims that there is NO activity that is not
> fundamentally socially embedded.
>
> R. Keith Sawyer
>
>
> http://www.keithsawyer.com/
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Education
> Washington University
> Campus Box 1183
> St. Louis, MO 63130
> 314-935-8724
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