1. We might acknowledge the importance of sociocultural context, but still
want to preserve an individual agent -- as the locus of unique experience
and the driving force behind action.
2. We might bracket the question of whether agents really exist, and study
how the (indisputably common and powerful) idea of individual agency
affects our ideas and practices. Someone pursuing this approach could
either be after a radically non-individualist account, or could be
sympathetic to a more traditional notion of agency.
3. We could develop a "dialectic" or "transactional" account of the
relation between individual and society, such that neither can be reduced
to the other. I am not exactly clear what this would look like.
Sometimes "dialectic" is used to mean simply that we include both factors
in our explanations (ie, going back and forth from one to the other). This
would seem less than satisfying, because if we're going to acknowledge an
individual in the traditional sense (at some point in the process), why not
just go with option #1 above? At other times, "dialectic" is used in a
more Hegelian sense, to imply that somehow the two initial poles are
"synthesized," and a new unit is created. But for this to work, we need
to specify what is lacking in both the thesis (individual agency) and the
antithesis (social determinism), and how the new synthesis incorporates
the strengths of both while leaving behind (at least some of) their
weaknesses. It was this sort of synthesis that I thought Wertsch et al
were after in their chapter -- and which I was hoping could be worked out
more fully.
Stanton Wortham