For some reason Keith's reply came directly to me, rather than to xmca. I've
changed the settings on my email client to see if that fixes things.
In the meantime, here is Keith's reply:
On Monday 22 April 2002 12:44, Keith Sawyer wrote:
> 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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