Finally, a response to Bill Barowy's posting of 4/23, I've been out of
touch...
I think that a broader discussion of Giddens would be interesting for XMCA,
and for sociocultural theory more generally. I think it's surprising that
there hasn't been more application of Giddens' writings to socioculturalist
issues.
More on why I dissed Giddens in my last posting. I agree with Bill that
the prose per se is not that difficult, and I agree that he says a lot of
things that sound right. But it's difficult to tease out a coherent
theoretical position underneath it all. For example, his conception of
"rules" (he is making an analogy from Chomskian syntactic rules) is highly
problematic (and has been widely criticized). Giddens is insightful as a
reader and interpreter of classic, difficult works in sociological theory.
But I'm not sure that Giddens' own writings result in a coherent
theoretical framework. And it's particularly difficult to translate his
work into empirical social science research (I cited some sociologists who
make this argument in my "Unresolved tensions" article).
A great example is Giddens' position on inseparability of agency and
structure. I am glad that Bill emphasizes the ontological/methodological
distinction that I make in my writing; in contrast, Giddens explicitly
insists that one cannot make this distinction. For Giddens, there can be
NO methodological separation of agency and structure, of individual and
context. (This is where I compare him to some writings by Rogoff and by
Lave.) It's hard to imagine how you could turn this position into an
empirical program (as I argue in the "Unresolved tensions" article).
In contrast, Margaret Archer agrees that agency and structure are always
tightly woven together in complex systems, but holds that they can be
analytically separated. This position is more congenial to CHAT because in
Engestrom's pyramid, for example, activity, subject, and context are
analytically separated. CHAT is not compatible with Giddens' theory.
>The question i have is -- where in Giddens writing can i specifically find
>treatments of strong/context-insensitive inseparability?
Bill, could you clarify that question?
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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