Re: [xmca] Billet's paper

From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
Date: Fri Oct 13 2006 - 10:50:48 PDT


Billett writes on pg. 62, "Humans appear to have the capacity for
reflective self-evaluation manifested in second-order desires. These
desires are those shaped over time, as in subjectivities. So, rather that
merely being driven by external pressures and sources, individuals have the
capacity to be reflective and evaluative about their societal subjugation.
. ." I take this to mean that people can AT TIMES choose what cultural or
historical parameter have influence over them and for Billett one place
where this occurs is in the workplace. It is not that the individual is in
conflict with the cultural-historical order of the workplace but rather the
individual can make choices about how the culture of the workplace
influences individual worker's traits. I do not find this much different
than the studies conducted by Sylvia Scribner and presented in the
January/April 1984 volume of the "Laboraty of Comparative Human Cognition"
newletter. On page 5 of the above cited newsletter she writes,
"Occupational responsibilities in the dairy included many problem solving
tasks whose performance features differed from those represented in
laboratory models. These tasks were embedded in larger sequences of
activities whose purposes they served. Many occurred in settings in which
modes of solution were constrained, not only by the internal structure of
the problem domain, but by the objective, contextual aspects of the
situations in which the problem arose. And in many, the process of
arriving at a solution involved a continuing and dynamic interaction
between the problem-solver and the world."

what do others think?
eric

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