Anna, I agree with most of what you say in your posting and I don't view it
as critical. I just went and took a look at the Linehan and McCarthy
article, and their comments have much overlap with my own. I have a
clarification in response to Anna's query: by "inseparability" I mean
between individual and context, between agency and structure (these
parallels are not identical but are similar enough for purposes of this
discussion).
I agree with Anna that there are many voices noting that a strong
inseparability view makes it difficult to theorize the individual. One
additional observation that we get from Archer's critique of Giddens is
that strong inseparability also makes it difficult to analyze social
structure, and the relation between the two:
>In other words, the
>problem is not that they stand on inseparability position but that they do
>not specify concretely enough what the mind and the context are and what
>kind of concrete mechanisms allow for these links between these. This is
>also the difficulty of the sociocultural approach in general, or as Nate
>correctly noticed, the real stumbling block is the internalization process.
I believe that it is exactly inseparability that leads a theorist to reject
the concept of "internalization," and to reject the exploration of the
links. This is the way that Rogoff sets it up, in any case, and this
connection has been the target of Valsiner's critique (and a factor in some
other's as well).
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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