Reading :: Beyond the Brain

Beyond the Brain: An Agentive Activity Perspective on Mind, Development, and Learning
By Igor Arievitch

This book reminds me of a book by Arievitch's frequent collaborator, Anna Stetsenko: The Transformative Mind. Both books are discussing activity theory and Vygotskian theory in sophisticated ways that would be interesting to readers of Mind, Culture and Activity and similar CHAT journals. But at the same time, both seem to be arguing against the cognitivist paradigm, a paradigm that has already been rejected by those readers. This dichotomy in their anticipated readership really throws me off. For instance, Arievitch critiques "brainism" (Ch.2), the tendency to reduce the mind to brain functions. But anyone who has much grounding in CHAT already knows the argument against brainism—an argument with roots in the Vygotsky collection Mind in Society, which was published in the US in 1978, cementing Vygotsky's reputation as the Mozart of psychology. According to Google Scholar, Mind in Society has over 130,000 citations. So I concluded that Chapter 2 really wasn't for me, and skimmed until I got to Chapter 3.

From Chapter 3 on, we get into more interesting territory. Arievitch, who studied under Leontiev, Luria, and Galperin (!!), draws heavily from Galperin's work—work that has largely not been translated into English. 

In Chapter 3, Arievitch forwards the claim that thinking can only be understood in terms of shared activity, with the mind regulating and orienting the individual as they interact with their ever-changing environment (p.25). Learning is social: it "takes place in shared activity of the child and the adult mediated by cultural tools" (p.25). And this brings us to Galperin's unique contribution: "he was one of the few scholars who explicitly made questions about the origin and function of non-automatic regulation of activity the focal point of his whole theory" (p.34). 

Arievitch argues that Vygotsky did not consistently apply his own developmental approach to cultural mediation (p.55). But such mediators, especially signs, can "restructure and 'amplify' human memory, attention, thinking, and therefore enhance the individual's ability to solve challenging tasks" (p.96). This question of cognitive tools, he says, has been fundamental to Vygotskians (p.115). 

He concludes by arguing that the mind has to be understood as an embodied agent (p.147). Where Vygotsky failed to sufficiently operationalize his approach, the agentive activity perspective attempts to do so. 

This review is only the barest discussion of this book, which has a lot in it. If you're intrigued by CHAT approaches, and especially if you want to contrast them with brainism, definitely take a look at this book.

Reading :: Community

Community: Pursuing the Dream, Living the Reality
By Suzanne Keller

I picked this book up to better understand how cultural sociologists understand community, and I'm glad I did. The book starts by examining the scholarship around community, then analyzes the growth of (human) community in a planned community, Twin Rivers, NJ, over 30 years. 

Part I (the first three chapters) mainly examines the scholarship on community, and I found it to be extremely valuable, as it addresses landmark sociology on community (Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber) via a well-integrated review that helped me see the development of the concept over time. 

In Chapter 1, Keller notes that "community is a chameleon term that is used in many, often contradictory ways" (p.4), including two "prevalent perspectives": that of "an organism where the whole is more important than individual members" and the more recent "atomistic/contrarian" model in which free persons are bound together in a voluntary social contract (pp.4-5). Community is often related to the following:

• Place, turf, territory. Nearly every commentator understands community as related to "a bounded, identifiable territory" until recent discussions of "cyberspace" (p.6). 
• Shared ideals and expectations (pp.6-7)
• Network of social ties and allegiances (p.7)
• Collective framework (p.7)

In contrast, community is not interpersonal intimacy, formal organization membership, group affiliation based on identity, or communitarianism, which emphasizes "a set of moral and philosophical principles" (pp.7-8). 

Keller asks: "How can self be linked to community and how can community be linked to society?" (p.9). This question animates the study in Part II -- but before we get there, we will examine each term.

Society "might be thought of as an overarching system of social, political, and cultural arrangements that encompass the totality. Its practices are formalized and abstract; its scale is superpersonal" (p.11). In contrast, community "is tangible, proximate, based on direct contact, mutual awareness, and a sense of empathy with those with whom one shares one's life in a definite place. In community, self and terrain are intertwined" (p.11). Community has been addressed by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, de Toqueville, Marx, and Tonnies, and central questions of community are:

• "How are communities created and maintained over time?"
• "How is a 'spirit of community' generated?"
• "How are human differences bridged for the sake of the common good?" (p.13)

In Chapter 2, Keller discusses four prototypes of community: the Greek polis, the monastic community, the Puritan commonwealth, and 19th-century utopian communities. The tensions among these prototypes are behind the confusion in discussions of community today, since the same term is applied to different conceptions (p.39). In Chapter 3, Keller then turns to sociological work on community, starting with Tonnies' 1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (founded in Hobbes; p.41). Durkheim produced a counterproposal, his division between mechanical and organic solidarity, which are fundamentally different from Tonnies' categories (p.43). (Weber also builds on Tonnies; p.44). Tonnies understood Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as ideal types, but also as historical trends and types of social relations— a fact that introduced some confusion (p.44). Modern societies embrace both types of relations (p.46). 

With this background, we get to Part II: The case of Twin Rivers. Keller argues that leaders played a crucial role in guiding collectivity and creating schemes of behavior (p.202). Initially, leaders were hard to attract, but after three decades, leadership positions became competitive (p.203). Interestingly, Keller found that leaders worked for the community due to different motivations, from ego to power to the challenge of making a difference (p.208). However, almost all leaders cited the principle of giving back to the community, something that was instilled by their families (p.208). 

Based on this study, Keller outlines ten "standard dimensions that form the bedrock of community" (p.266):

1. "A bounded site of territory or turf"
2. "Criteria of membership"
3. "An institutional framework of laws and rules"
4. "A set of values emphasizing cooperation, mutual responsibility, and sharing"
5. "A belief system that validates a particular way of life"
6. "A myth of community embodied in images, ideals, aspirations, and goals"
7. "Shared rituals and celebrations"
8. "Leadership structure"
9. "Social relationships that are personal, direct, responsive, and trusting"
10. "Transcendent purposes and goals" (pp.266-267)

Importantly, and related to #2, "collective identity rests on social exclusion to some degree," with outgroups defining the ingroup. In Twin Rivers, the outgroup was a nearby community that they contrasted with themselves (p.286). 

I've only given an outline of parts of the book that particularly interested me. But if you're interested in community—what it is, how it's defined, how it forms and develops—definitely pick up this book. 

Reading :: Regional Advantage

Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128
By Annalee Saxenian

My IC2 colleagues have been recommending this book to me for a while, and I finally got to read it near the end of the fall 2021 semester. Written by a professor of city and regional planning, the book answers the question posed on the back cover: "Why is it that business in Silicon Valley is again flourishing while within Route 128 in Massachusetts it continues to decline?" The answer of 1994—the book's original publishing date—is that "Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations" (again via the back cover). 

Saxenian comes to this conclusion by comparing the regions historically, arguing that Silicon Valley developed "competition and community" (Ch.2), while Route 128 developed "independence and hierarchy" (Ch.3). Saxenian argues that to understand this comparison, we have to think in terms of regions, not cities or individual companies. "It is helpful to think of a region's industrial system as having three dimensions: local institutions and culture, industrial structure, and corporate organization" (p.7). 

In terms of culture, she notes that Silicon Valley's "culture encouraged risk and accepted failure" (p.38), while SV's firms "blurred the boundaries between firms" and eliminated "traditional boundaries between employers and employees and between corporate functions within the firm," replacing them with "independent confederations of project teams that were linked by intense, informal communications and that mirrored the region's decentralized industrial structure" (p.50). Unfortunately, she says, these entrepreneurs lacked the language to "describe this unusual mix of cooperation and competition," instead seeing themselves as rugged individualists: "They attributed their spectacular growth and unchallenged dominance of world markets to individual technical prowess and entrepreneurial risk-taking." And "Assuming that the dynamism of free markets would be self-perpetuating and self-governing, they saw no need to attend to the institutional foundations of their vitality," leading them to make choices that would eventually threaten the region (p.57).

Meanwhile, although Saxenian sees some examples of similar community-oriented networks in MIT's hackers, these were atypical in Massachusetts' Route 128 (p.59). Along Route 128, people were reluctant to take risks; business and personal life were separate; and business associations were merely sources of information, not integrative sources of enduring networks (p.69). Route 128 developed its own "combination of decentralized authority and continuous negotiation," the matrix (p.75), which generated conflict while masking centralization of authority (p.76). Matrix organizations tended to be indecisive (p.117). 

Consequently, Route 128's capabilities "were internalized within large firms and thus not available to start-ups or to other local producers"; they did not develop the combination of competition and collaboration that yielded Silicon Valley's innovation (p.111). 

In her conclusion, Saxenian argues that regions must shake off autarkic mindsets and instead construct more decentralized industrial systems (p.165). She argues that a regional strategy must be tailored to the problems and conditions of particular locations (p.167).

Overall, I found this book to be well worth reading. It helped me to think through units larger than the organization but smaller than overall "culture." If you're interested in doing the same, definitely check it out!