Jay Lemke wrote:
> Sara's rich examples of her participation in networks of social activity
> that cross settings and link subcommunities is highlighted by the
> perspectives other have offered on the differential coercivity of settings,
> the importance of linkage for understanding scale, and the meanin-making
> habits of the communities we travel among.
>
> This shifts the focus of the discussion in interesting ways from my
> original emphasis on coercion as the prime differentiator between formal
> and informal settings for learning. We take further steps toward asking
> what kinds of coercivity matter in different settings, and what the
> implications are of the fact that we are always travelling between settings
> and from one community's lifeways to another's.
>
> Sara's first example seems to illustrate best my original point: the people
> making the decisions belong to activity worlds that may intersect with the
> worlds where the decisions apply, but the length of the chains of
> connections, and the nature of those connections (their de facto asymmetry
> of power and communication) seems to mean that democracy, and often good
> decision-making, have been lost through our wrong solutions to the problems
> of scale. The assistant commisioner wields power and influence at the table
> because of his/her participation in other networks of activity where
> longer-term, wider-scale social processes (elections and appointments,
> statistical data-gathering, tax revenue collecting, budget document
> writing) are crystallized into semiotic artifacts (data tables, budgets,
> minutes of meetings) that create links across many levels of scale: from
> the big-scale, long network processes to the small-scale short network
> ones; from what his/her commission depends on for its powerbase, to actual
> minute-to-minute human scale activities. The assistant commissioner
> her/himself becomes such an object (a special kind of 'boundary object'),
> circulating between primary commission activities and other activities like
> the curriculum committee. Traditional sociology recognizes that
> institutional power usually inheres in roles rather than in persons as
> such, but tends to miss the ways in which people serve as the material
> links between different institutions, and what happens as power migrates in
> the body of a person, from institution to institution, or setting to
> setting, or community to community. Particularly in the very important case
> where the settings belong to activity networks in which processes on very
> different social-ecological scales take place.
>
> Both Sara and the commissioner circulate among some of the same settings,
> but the commisioner, more than Sara, is also a cross-scale object/actant.
> (This oversimplifies a lot; what matters is how the processes on the
> different scales are articulated through this actant and his/her actions,
> which depends on the affordances of the settings, and the strategies of the
> actor, as well as what processes are linked.)
>
> The newsletter can help, because it links Sara into another higher scale,
> longer-network system of processes. Crudely, it is a potential source of
> power (cf. the teacher newsletter in Chicago that made the city's
> superficial tests public), but more fundamentally it creates new linkages,
> new interdependencies, and it crosses scales ... note that the newspaper
> itself as a semiotic artifact links the activity on the shorter and more
> local timescale of reading it, discussing it, waving it at a public meeting
> ... to the activity on the longer and more extended scale of gathering the
> information in it, publishing and distributing it ... and in effect creates
> correlations among the activities of different readers, groups, etc.
>
> And consider Sara herself as such an artifact/actant ... her account is
> well aware of how she has become a unique intersection of different roles,
> migrating between her worlds, and so potentially creating linkages among
> them (will she make an academic counter-argument to a burocratic discourse
> in the meeting? will she bring her firsthand knowledge of families in the
> community to bear in a curriculum meeting?). Her dilemmas are recognized by
> others in our discussion who note how the norms of different _settings_
> tend to restrict us in what seems appropriate to say, or who may speak, or
> what kind of discourse is legitimate there. There is implicit coercivity in
> social norms and value assignments (cf. Bourdieu on capital in different
> fields), and also more explicit "silencing" when these norms are broken, or
> just when someone with positional power uses it to back their interest. To
> what extent should we learn to do as the Romans when in their city, and to
> what extent should we announce that since we are here, it is our city, too,
> and we do things differently? To what extent should we learn to follow, and
> to what extent should we learn in order to lead in new directions?
>
> JAY.
>
> PS. Stan Salthe, a pioneer in the analysis of levels of scale in complex
> systems, is quite active on the research scene (though retired from
> teaching); he and I are giving papers in Gent in May on this subject.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------