It strikes me that Seymour Sarason was particularly insightful, as was so
often the case, when he made the creation of settings an issue in the
1950s. We ought to make the creation, life, death, or transfiguration of
settings an issue ... indeed, this is an issue for which historical
studies of the right kind, microgenetic institutional studies, would be of
much more than antiquarian interest.
In his retrospective commentary on the creation of settings, Seymour
raises the issue of the "death" or "failure" of settings. I suppose that
if you are an originator you do have to be very concerned about preserving
the life of a new setting against the entropic forces that more-or-less
constantly tend to break down the integrity or cohesiveness of the new
social arrangement. But what instantly came to mind as I read Seymour's
commentary was a casual remark that John Whiting once made at a meeting:
"Any human institution ought to have a programmed death point set for ten
years after the date of its birth."
This curiously definite temporal specification on John's part stuck in my
mind, and I have often thought of it when considering evidence bearing on
the life and death of human institutions. As a result of all these
ponderings, I'm tempted to offer a revised form of the Whiting Principle,
as follows: "Any human institution generally HAS a programmed death point
set for ten years after the date of its birth."
What the Revised Whiting Principle means is that the spontaneous impulses
-- of creativity in the individual, of good will and we-feeling in the
cooperating group -- generally get used up in about ten years of life of a
new behavior setting. The setting goes flat and/or it unravels, loses
people. The Revised Whiting Principle seems to fly in the face of the
evident fact that a good many human institutions are a lot more than 10
years old -- General Motors, for example, or the Psychology Department of
Harvard University, the Judge Baker Child Guidance Center, McDonald's
Hamburgers, etc., etc. I think that what happens after 10 years is that
behavior settings get revolutionized -- some other group of human beings
comes along, takes over the setting, lives in it, re-animates it so that
it marches to a different drum. Or else, the behavior settings are
emptied of self-initiated, agentic, creative impulses and become absorbed
as limbs or organs of larger social entities.
I'm being slightly provocative in pushing this Revised Whiting Principle,
of course, but I am absolutely certain that in order to understand human
development we have to understand more about the life courses of the
settings they live in and create.
A spontaneous reaction, Mike. There's an earlier paper on your part that
I'm holding in order to offer a less-spontaneous, more thought-out
reaction in a little while. Fun to think about this stuff!
Shep