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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