Reading :: The Transformative Mind

The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky's Approach to Development and Education
By Anna Stetsenko

Anna Stetsenko has an impressive biography. As she describes in an autobiographical sketch near the beginning of this thick book, she studied at Moscow University "at a time when it was the hotbed of Vygotsky's approach" in the mid-70s through the late 80s. There, she interacted and sometimes collaborated with A.R. Luria, both A.N. and A.A. Leontiev, P.Y. Galperin, D.B. Elkonin, V.V. Davydov, and others. After the collapse of the USSR, she worked first in Europe and then in the US (at CUNY, where she is currently) (p.15). Relocating, she said, was an eye-opening experience, allowing her to see new perspectives (p.16). It also led her to see the USSR's 1991 collapse and the West's triumphalism with a more critical eye; she sees the 2008 financial collapse as the other shoe dropping (pp.16-17).

Considering this deep well of life experiences, Stetsenko proposes in this book to develop Vygotskian theory toward what she calls the Transformative Activist Stance (TAS), an approach that "builds off from the dialectical premises of Vygotsky's project and their broader foundations in Marxist philosophy" (p.4), one that attempts to address impasses in Vygotsky's project and canonical Marxism, emphasizing human subjectivity "as a necessary vehicle of collaborative meaningful practices/activities of people aimed at purposefully transforming the world in view of the sought-after future" (p.5). Stetsenko draws on aligned sociocultural projects, but also works as diverse as feminist theory, Foucault, Bordieu, and Freire (p.5). That is, Stetsenko rereads the work of Vygotsky and activity theorists from the standpoint of activism. How do we apply Vygotsky today, and how can we positively transform our own world (p.10)?

Given Stetsenko's deep biography and her deep study—conducted in Russian as well as English—I am cautious about critiquing her work. Yet I do have some hesitations about this work, which I'll discuss more thoroughly below.

The book has five parts. Part I introduces the idea of TAS and the need for an activist theory. Part II reviews Vygotsky's project, including its development through the cultural-historical school. Part III covers ontology, epistemology, and agency, while Part IV discusses mind. Finally, Part V outlines implications for education.

We can see the resonance between Vygotsky's project and activism in Part I. From the Vygotskian perspective, "human capabilities and capacities are constituted in and through the process of development—as they are brought into realization in the course of people actively engaging in, contributing to, and transforming collaborative social practices that are culturally mediated, socially contextualized, and contingent on material resources including critical-theoretical tools ... of agency" (p.25). This perspective seems like a good fit for activism, in which "development is about participating yet is also, and even more critically, about contributing to transformative communal practices from one or the other side, or position or stance, on their dilemmas and contradictions. ... social change and agency are ubiquitous, endemic, and immanent in the world understood as a realm that not only embeds, grounds, and gives rise to human development but is co-created by social collaborative practices embodied in individual and communal ways of being, knowing, and doing" (p.34). The shift to an activist stance entails exchanging a viewpoint of competition and survival for one of collaboration and solidarity (p.36).

Stetsenko believes that this stance is crucial at the current historical moment, which she characterizes as an "ongoing crisis in social, economic, and political landscapes" in which education in particular is characterized by

an enforcement of a crude, narrow model of evidence-based, disinterested, value-neutral science that is devoid of theory and tailored to reductionist views of nature, human development, education, and mind. These models prize biological explanations that put human development in service to natural selection and adaptation; focus on isolated individuals as prime units of analysis; equate mind with the brain; and promote the mantras of neutral evidence, all taken as standards of what is claimed to be the only way to do objective science. (p.42).

She characterizes this work as "supernaturalist orthodoxy" and characterizes the orthodoxy's view of research thus:

research is supposed to be based on presumably "naked" evidence composed of "raw" facts about "indomitable" nature and "pristine" reality (all supposedly residing in biological processes and phenomena)—as we find them "here and now," somehow purged of human dimensions and independent from not only society, history and context but even from the more immediately situated processes and practices of knowledge production and research. (pp.42-43)

Unfortunately—and this is my first substantial critique of the book—Stetsenko provides no citations representing the viewpoints she is critiquing. The quotes appear to be scare quotes, and the sole cite for the paragraph is Gould 1988 (substantiating a more specific claim later in the paragraph). Although as a humanist I found myself somewhat receptive to this argument, it's awfully broad-brush, and Stetsenko makes enough such arguments that I grew cautious of such characterizations. (For instance, on p.316 she does cite the viewpoints she is critiquing: she lumps Hutchins, Clark, and others into a single movement, then claims that those in this movement "still often do not go far enough" because they "leave intact the basic premise of the brain as processing information through computations." Hutchins does emphatically see the brain as performing computational work, but this processing is not different in kind from other computational work being performed outside the skull—this is the very point of his book, which Stetsenko cites.)

Back to activism. Stetsenko notes that in the adaptionist ethos, sociocultural and critical approaches typically focus on challenging the status quo, but not on fundamentally changing it (p.62). Examples include Foucault, Latour, and Deleuze (p.64). Later, she discusses the activist limits of other sociocultural scholarship, noting that one ramification of many such views is that they imply that "extra-personal forces" (neurological processes shaped by genetics; collective cultural or power processes) "guide and shape human development and learning"—"eschewing the status of human beings in their own lives and communities" (p.79). Missing is

the transformative agency of people, qua social agents of communities and their histories, to shape and essentially create their world, their future, and their own development while relying on the social and cultural resources that they bring into existence and co-create in each and every act of their lives. (p.79)

And here's my second critique. If you've been reading my recent reviews, maybe you are thinking of the same thing I am. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union was also wrestling with two views: a causal, determinist, teleological view of history and human development, and a nondeterminist one that put collective human agency and achievement at the center. Both were rooted in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The first view, the mechanist or Bukharinite view, meshed well with early pedology: the assumption was that as Russia transitioned from a capitalist to a socialist footing, the new environment would transform the students. Some pedologists even called for a "withering away of the school," in which schools would become obsolete in the new environment. The second view, the dialectical or Deborinite view, focused on human agency and became more popular in education in the early 1930s—when it became clear that a socialist regime in itself did not cure the problems of education. Vygotsky, who knew his Marx and was deeply influenced by the 1925 publication of Engels' Dialectics of Nature, arguably tended toward the dialectical. The Deborinites won decisive victories in 1931 and 1938 (i.e., Stalin endorsed their views), and pedology was banned in 1936. Hence, for political and historical reasons, activity theory tends to reflect the dialectical stance—if it had not, it would not have survived as a going concern.

On p.79 and elsewhere in the book, Stetsenko recapitulates the basics of the debate between mechanists and dialecticians—although she does not draw the connection explicitly, and I doubt that she sees the parallel. But the cultural-historical school and the activity-theoretical school were historical products, and understanding their history helps us to understand how they are predisposed to understanding human activity in specific ways. When Stetsenko complains that "many contemporary critical and sociocultural approaches" undertheorize "active human persons and activities," and urges us to understand "the power of human transformative agency ... as an individually unique achievement of togetherness" (p.83), she selects a research stance that was formed specifically to focus on that transformative power, and developed within a political milieu that mandated such a view.

Side note: This point made me wonder about something that Engestrom notes in his new introduction to the second edition of Learning by Expanding. Engestrom complained:

there is a risk that activity theory is split into the study of activity systems, organizations, and history, on the one hand, and subjects, actions, and situations, on the other hand. This is exactly the kind of split the founders of activity theory set out to overcome. To bridge and integrate the two directions, serious theoretical and empirical efforts are needed. (p.xvi)

I now wonder if this split interacts with the latent tension between mechanist (contextually oriented, causal) and dialectical (individually oriented, agential) traditions. Now there's a dissertation topic if someone is looking for one.

Back to Stetsenko. At the end of this discussion, she argues that Vygotsky's "passionate quest for equality and justice" has been "all but ignored" in the West (p.89, her emphasis). "The project of immediate relevance to Vygotsky and his colleagues consisted of efforts at creating a new system of education for society that was in the process of being created and forged, practically from scratch" (p.89), and like Vygotsky, Stetsenko "commits to matters of equality as the first analytical step" (p.90). She adds that this method is "the very gist of Vygotsky's project": an egalitarian society for a future society. "This future society cannot be charted nor predicted in full detail in advance, that is, it cannot be construed as a utopia ... imagined as something one can simply await in hopes that someday it might arrive" but through active struggle (p.91). This passage seems to sum up the dialectic case against the mechanists, although Stetsenko does not refer to that historical debate.

Let's follow this line of critique further. At this point in the book, Stetsenko begins to discuss her project in the context of history. She does not draw on critical historical scholarship of Soviet psychology such as Bauer, Joravsky, Valsiner, Veresov, Haenen, Petrovsky, Blunden, Valsiner & Van der Veer, or Van der Veer & Valsiner. She does briefly mention one of Kozulin's articles to dispute his claim that Leontiev broke with Vygotsky (p.146), but she does not cite either of the books in which he lays out this case: Vygotsky's Psychology or Psychology in Utopia. Perhaps as a result, the historical exploration of Vygotsky's ideas is oddly ahistorical. Vygotsky is portrayed as "uniquely" activist and focused on egalitarianism, but the historical conditions that validated and enabled this stance are barely discussed (p.96). The break between Vygotsky and Leontiev is sutured together and dismissed (p.97; 146). At the same time, Vygotsky is sundered from his intellectual forebears: Stetsenko notes the complementary viewpoints of Piaget and Dewey, the "three key frameworks on human development in the 20th century" (p.128) and says that "it is remarkable—and highly ironic—that the common grounds of the theories have been all but ignored" (p.153), without acknowledging that they are similar in part because Vygotsky drew heavily from both Piaget and Dewey's pragmatist colleague Mead. Similarly, she plays up Vygotsky's reliance on Darwin without noting that he interpreted Darwin through Engels's origin story. She argues that Vygotsky "appeared to waver" at times, and argues that the task of stabilizing his views fell to Leontiev (p.147).

That is, Vygotsky is portrayed here as a lone genius who developed a uniquely activist stance. Leontiev is portrayed as taking up this project and developing it further—although she acknowledges that Leontiev and Davydov erroneously accepted objective reality "at least in part due to them working under the pressures of a unidirectional, top-down ideology" (p.183)—a rare nod to the historical contingencies that shape theory. And now Stetsenko calls us to take up this activist stance handed down from Vygotsky. In the remainder of the book, she links the stance to other activist lines of thought and contrasts it to "canonical Marxism" (e.g., p.183).

After the section on the history of Vygotskian thought, Stetsenko links the Vygotskian tradition to Marxism more broadly and to activism. She urges us to interpret Marx dialectically, not mechanically (p.194) and finally addresses mechanism explicitly in Marx, only to explain it away (p.250). She also embraces Bakhtin, especially the aspects of open-endedness and unfinalizability that Bakhtin wrote about in his private notebooks.

In the last chapter, she discusses the implications for education. One implication is to place identity at the forefront (p.339). Doing so provides a contact point with Leontiev's work: after Stalin's death, Leontiev published on consciousness and personality. These were safe subjects in the USSR at the time (after being quite unsafe in the mid-1930s). She concludes with an agenda to radicalize activity theory (p.367), a theory that arguably survived in the Soviet Union by being apolitical.

So what did I think of the book? I've aired some of the disagreements I have with the author. Perhaps it's because she has attempted such a broad sweep, but it seems like the author has divided her sources into positive and negative valences, then construed every source of positive valence as supporting TAS. The cultural-historical developments of the theory—and especially the historically developing contradictions and tensions—seem to be minimized or unacknowledged. When such tensions exist in the theory—such as the tension between telos and dialectics in Marx and Engels, or the tension between semiotic mediation and activity in Vygotsky and Leontiev—Stetsenko tends to minimize them or explain them away. When such tensions and limitations exist in competing theories, they are grounds for dismissing those competitors. This approach allows the author to prosecute her case, but at the cost of dramatically simplifying the theory's development and limiting our understanding of how it came to be—its potential and its limitations.

For all that, I think I have not sufficiently emphasized the value of Stetsenko's project. Activity theory has strong potential for broader applications, but its traditionally apolitical stance has arguably limited its uptake. In this book, Stetsenko thinks through how an activist activity theory—not an interventionist one, as Engestrom has developed, but an activist one that is oriented to politics and agency—might look. That's a worthwhile project, and it makes the book worth reading and rereading.

(Incoming)

Usually I post book reviews on Wednesdays. But, believe it or not, I have caught up with my books this week. Instead, I've been working on an article about ... well, you'll see, but I can tell you that I've been heavily using my own reviews for the last couple of years.

In the meantime, I am reading two books:

The Transformative Mind: Expanding Vygotsky's Approach to Development and Education is Anna Stetsenko's project for basing a transformative activist stance on Vygotsky's work. Stetsenko studied with Leontiev, then migrated to Europe and then the US after the USSR's collapse, so she brings a broad set of experiences to bear on her project. I'm about a third through this book.

Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies: The State of the Art is a 2015 collection by Yasnitsky and Van der Veer. It's tremendously expensive, but my library has it in electronic form, so I began reading it through the library service. Unfortunately, that reading experience is so horrible that I couldn't get very far, yet the chapters I read were so remarkable that I had to read the rest. So the physical copy is now on my shelf, waiting for me to finish the Stetsenko book.

I'm excited about both, and I hope to review at least one by next Wednesday.

Reading :: Literature and Revolution

Literature and Revolution
By Leon Trotsky

(The link goes to Amazon, but you can also find this book at marxists.org, from where I copied and pasted the quotes.)

I confess that I have zero interest in literature. However, Lev Vygotsky had a deep interest in the subject, which was the topic of his dissertation The Psychology of Art (which marxists.org says was written 1917, but defended in 1925). Like Vygotsky, Trotsky was a Jewish intellectual whose fortunes had dramatically improved through the 1917 Revolution, one who was enthralled with literature. So Trotsky's 1923 book Literature and Revolution—published before Stalin consolidated power, a year before Lenin's death, and a year before Vygotsky's invitation to join the Psychological Institute in Moscow—made a deep impact on Vygotsky and was incorporated and quoted in the dissertation, defended just two years later. And what would be safer than quoting the scholarship of one of the leaders of the Revolution?

By 1927, Trotsky had lost his struggle with Stalin and been removed from power. By February 1929, he had been exiled from the Soviet Union. And when Vygotsky's dissertation was published in the USSR in the mid-1960s, his quote of Trotsky was excised. But Trotsky's influence is still detectable sub rosa even in Vygotsky's 1930 essay "The Socialist Alteration of Man" (discussed in an earlier review). Specifically, this influence was Trotsky's vision of the New Soviet Man, a vision that thrived in the USSR, detached from Trotsky.

The passage that Vygotsky quoted is at the end of this book, but let's start at the beginning and get the building blocks in place. In this book, Trotsky contemplates the question of revolutionary literature, which he regards as a vital question: yes, the dictatorship of the proletariat must solve elementary problems first (food, clothing, shelter, literacy); but "the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch," including the Soviet epoch then at hand (p.29). At this point, non-Revolutionary literature was "dying, together with the classes which it served" (p.32). He adds that although "there are decades of struggle ahead of us, in Europe and in America," the Revolution would win out, and its art with it. Trotsky was an optimist: "This new art is incompatible with pessimism, with skepticism, and with all the other forms of spiritual collapse. It is realistic, active, vitally collectivist, and filled with a limitless creative faith in the Future" (p.33). One can see why Vygotsky, also an optimist, would be drawn to this vision.

Trotsky categorizes all literature as non-Revolutionary (or pre-Revolutionary), transitional, or bourgeois; the art of the Revolution was not yet born at this point (p.61). After all, the Revolution itself was in a transitional phase, currently ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat—which at this point Trotsky had accepted was going to last longer than he had thought in 1917. "When we wish to denounce the all-too-optimistic views about the transition to socialism, we point out that the period of the social revolution, on a world scale, will last not months and not years, but decades—decades, but not centuries, and certainly not thousands of years" (p.154). In addressing whether a proletariat art might arise during this short timeline, he describes the coming new society as a prophet might describe Heaven:

But one may answer: It took thousands of years to create the slave-owning art and only hundreds of years for the bourgeois art. Why, then, could not proletarian art be created in tens of years? The technical bases of life are not at all the same at present and therefore the tempo is also different. This objection, which at first sight seems convincing, in reality misses the crux of the question. Undoubtedly, in the development of the new society, the time will come when economics, cultural life and art will receive the greatest impulse forward. At the present time we can only create fancies about their tempo. In a society which will have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about one’s daily bread, in which community restaurants will prepare good, wholesome and tasteful food for all to choose, in which communal laundries will wash clean everyone’s good linen, in which children, all the children, will be well fed and strong and gay, and in which they will absorb the fundamental elements of science and art as they absorb albumen and air and the warmth of the sun, in a society in which electricity and the radio will not be the crafts they are today, but will come from inexhaustible sources of super-power at the call of a central button, in which there will be no “useless mouths”, in which the liberated egotism of man – a mighty force! – will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the transformation and the betterment of the universe – in such a society the dynamic development of culture will be incomparable with anything that went on in the past. But all this will come only after a climb, prolonged and difficult, which is still ahead of us. And we are speaking only about the period of the climb. (p.157)

 And this new art will have certain characteristics, revived from the old forms:

One cannot tell whether revolutionary art will succeed in producing “high” revolutionary tragedy. But Socialist art will revive tragedy. Without God, of course. The new art will be atheist. It will also revive comedy, because the new man of the future will want to laugh. It will give new life to the novel. It will grant all rights to lyrics, because the new man will love in a better and stronger way than did the old people, and he will think about the problems of birth and death. The new art will revive all the old forms, which arose in the course of the development of the creative spirit. The disintegration and decline of these forms are not absolute, that is, they do not mean that these forms are absolutely incompatible with the spirit of the new age. All that is necessary is for the poet of the new epoch to re-think in a new way the thoughts of mankind, and to re-feel its feelings. (p.199)

 And "the shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous" (p.206).

And here we get to the quote that Vygotsky inserted into The Psychology of Art. I've included a page and a half's worth so that you can see what Trotsky was driving at, but I've also emphasized what I think are the most strikingly Vygotskian parts of the quote:

More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death. 

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. 

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise. (pp.206-207, my emphasis)

A few things here. First, if you've wondered why Vygotsky transitioned from his first love (literature) to psychology, perhaps this passage will provide insight: "Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction?" As Marx says in his "Theses on Feuerbach," "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." I can imagine this vision being tremendously compelling for a young idealist Vygostky, and Trotsky's statement would have reinforced this decision (although not sparked it).

Second, the theme of self-mastery is strong throughout; this theme, under the heading of mediation, shows up in Vygotsky's "instrumental" period in the 1920s. Specifically, this mediational account mingles with Vygotsky's reading of Engels' origin story of man in the 1930 book he wrote with Luria. (It also accords with Trotsky's declaration, following Marx, that "in the beginning was the deed" (p.153).

Third, Vygotsky's essay "The Soviet Alteration of Man" reads as a straightforward elaboration of this block quote. In particular, Trotsky's closing declaration that "The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx" seems to be echoed in Vygotsky's closing declaration that "one could say that new forms of labour will create the new man and that this new man will resemble the old kind of man, ‘the old Adam’, in name only, in the same way as, according to Spinoza’s great statement, a dog, the barking animal, resembles the heavenly constellation Dog."

So, although I continue not to be interested in the study of literature, this literary book helped me to better understand the works of Vygotsky. If you're interested in that goal as well, check it out.

(Fall graduate course: Sociocultural Approaches to Technology: North American Genre Theory)

E388M: Sociocultural Approaches to Technology: North American Genre Theory

Here's the description for my fall graduate course, which is part of a series of seminars I've been presenting on sociocultural approaches to technology. Previous entries in this series have been on actor-network theory and activity theory. If you're at UT, take a look.

In 1984, Carolyn Miller wrote the pivotal article "Genre as Social Action," applying Bakhtin's genre theory to rhetoric and thus theorizing genre, not as a collection of structural components, but as recurrent responses to rhetorical situations. This article became one of the origin points of North American Genre Theory (NAGT), an approach that draws from Bakhtin and other sociocultural theorists to account for how texts regularize and stabilize in regular use. With its materialist, situated approach to genre, NAGT has been mobilized for a variety of uses, including (especially) understanding digital texts in complex activities. 

In this course, we will develop a strong theoretical understanding of NAGT, starting with the texts of the Bakhtin Circle and examining how the notion of genre developed as it was taken up by North American scholars such as Miller, Bazerman, Berkenkotter, Russell, Freedman, Schryer, Schuster, and others. Special emphasis will be given to how NAGT allows us to make sense of assemblages of digital texts. Students will use NAGT as a starting point for their own seminar papers as well as gaining experience in producing digital texts. 

Assignments will include: 

• Annotated bibliography

• Literature review

• Digital storytelling, centered on a case, phenomenon, or set of articles related to NAGT

• Seminar paper

Reading :: Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union

Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union
By Jaan Valsiner

Before teaming up with Van der Veer to produce three influential books on the Soviet Union's cultural-historical school of psychology, Jaan Valsiner wrote this impressive 1988 book about Soviet developmental psychology. Just three years before the USSR's collapse, Valsiner aims to address the difficulties that Soviet and Western psychologists had in understanding each other. "In this respect, the present treatise is a narrative in the domain of sociology of social anthropology of a social science. Its goal is to analyze the usually hidden ties between the cultural organization of society and the thinking of psychologists, as well as an overview of developmental psychology in the USSR" (p.3). Interestingly, Valsiner explicitly rejects a Kuhnian reading because Kuhn's "paradigms" assume that sciences are framed separately from other sectors—something that was true in the West, but not in the USSR (p.11).

Valsiner begins with the historical context, specifically noting the 300+ years of pre-Soviet development of Russian culture, including both (a) the mingling of native Russian and European traditions and (b) the expansion of the Russian empire, which involved annexing new territories and incorporating non-Russians of various languages and cultures. "That history of annexation is the basis for the cross-culturally heterogeneous contemporary psychology in the USSR," he adds (p.20). Another contributor was Catherine the Great's demand for undivided loyalty, which provided the basis for Soviet thinking about the individual's relationship to society (p.29).

Valsiner then examines trends in psychology, specifically Bogdanov. Two features of his thinking are especially salient: (1) "the emphasis on external (environmental) determination of the internal changes of the system," which "follows the lines of both evolutionist and Marxist thought"; (2) his view that external history is not absolute but interacts with the internal relations of a system (p.36). These features made Bodganov's "environmentalism" similar to what would later be called interactionist psychology (p.37). Further, Bogdanov, like the Marxists, saw a system as developing through a series of crises involving the emergence of a new form (p.37).

Valsiner also reviews Bekhterev, whose contributions were broad. Specifically, "Bekhterev was the first Russian behavioural scientist who explicitly formulated the beginnings of an activity-theoretic perspective that later became the core of Soviet developmental psychology in different versions (Vygotsky, Leontiev, Zaporozhets, Basov, Ananiev and others" (p.53). Interestingly, Bekhterev used (and overextended) the concept of "energy" in his work, something that he coincidentally shared with Engels' dialectical view of nature; this happy coincidence helped Bekhterev to relate his energistic reflexology to Marxism once Engels' Dialectics of Nature was published in 1925.

The mid 1920s was an active time in Soviet psychology. As noted above, Dialectics of Nature certainly made an impact in 1925, not just in terms of reflexology but also in terms of the emerging cultural-historical school. But in addition, the educational system was in turmoil post-Revolution, trying out new (and often ill-conceived experiments) (cf. Bauer). In 1927, the Commisariat of Education imposed compulsory teaching plans and timetable, including a social studies program meant to consistently inculcate Soviet ideology—and recentered the teacher in the classroom (p.71). But experiments persisted until they were put to a stop with the 1936 Decree on Paedology . As Valsiner notes,

The variety of experiments in the Soviet educational system during the 1920s was quite understandable, as the whole society was overwhelmed with efforts to rebuild itself along 'new' lines. However, as is usually the case, the 'new' often constituted a direct refusal to make use of anything 'old'. At other times, some 'old' forms of organizing social life could emphatically be relabelled 'new'. Last (but not least), the new Soviet society was led by the Communist Party whose explicit aim was to preserve political power, and that could be easily challenged under the conditions of a highly heterogeneous society. (p.71)

The latter point led to a fortress mentality in which "The ghost of the 'bourgeoisie'" could be said to underlie any non-Soviet position; the ingroup felt under siege and rejected the ideas of the outgroup (p.73). Practically speaking, this mentality led to partiinost', or partisanship/party nature, as the basis for Soviet science (p.74). Although partiinost' can be attributed to Lenin, Valsiner notes that it can be traced back to Catherine II's introduction of "good citizenship" in the 18th century (p.74). Its purpose, Valsiner says, is to homogenize different world views of group members by establishing one dominant perspective. "Thus, 'partiinost'' constitutes an enthusiastic acceptance of the perspective that the party in power provides, by people who may originally have had different viewpoints" (p.75)

(A few things here. One, partiinost' can be rationalized with Engelsian dialectics, in which a single dialectical synthesis emerges from the contact of two antecedents. Two, partiinost' is consistent with Leontiev's view of methodology; from the Soviet view, a single methodology (and perspective) is vastly preferable to the cacophony of eclectic methodologies and perspectives embraced by the West. Three, partiinost' is opposed to the eclecticism for which Chelpanov was criticized and which led to his replacement by Kornilov (cf. p.81). Four, partiinost' is obviously incompatible with Bakhtinian dialogism.)

Partiinost' helps to explain the circular firing squad that Soviet psychology formed in the 1920s. If a group is composed of individuals who each have a perspective, but only one can be dominant, and that perspective will be determined by the party and taken to be truth, but the dominant perspective is always potentially reversible (Soviets referred to the law of dialectical negation here)—then competition is incentivized: ruthless competition to gain and hold the partiinost'. "The status of the ultimately true scientific metatheory is by definition based on the dialectical materialism of all sciences, and on historical materialism in all social sciences. From this axiomatic perspective, every possible theory or empirical investigation is evaluated in terms of its 'true' or 'erring' nature" (p.76).

Valsiner argues that "it is in the context of efforts towards socializing people in the belief in internalized acceptance of partiinost' that the changes in Soviet society can be understood" (p.100). Specifically, the Party could "change its course without the loss of any credibility in the eyes of believers who had internalized the concept" (p.100). The most important thing was active loyalty to the Party—not whether the Party's position was adequately related to reality (p.100). "A person whose loyalty to a certain belief system is strongly internalized does not need external guidelines of action, his (or her) own thinking leads to acting in the socialized way" (p.101; cf. Fitzgerald on the "permanent ambiguity" under Stalin). Valsiner proffers the example of Lysenko, noting that Lysenko's views about the environmental modification of the species were shared by Soviet child psychologists (pp.102-103; cf. Bauer on the early focus on environment in Soviet pedology and Vygotsky's "The Socialist Alteration of Man"). Granted,

Vygotsky did not try to advance this developmental idea to its ultimate conclusion, always reminding himself and his listeners (readers) of the limited nature of that modifiability. However, some of his disciples (such as A.N. Leont'ev) had no difficulty in agreeing with Lysenko's basic ideas in developmental psychology at the height of Lysenkoism at the end of the 1940s (see Bauer, 1949). The evangelistic social ethos of the utopian 'new society' inhabited by 'new man' whose active input on the environment is always progressive when carried out under the wise leadership of the Party, made it only too natural for both Lysenkoites and Soviet psychologists to speculate on the topic of modifiability of development in nature and psychology. (pp.103-104)

Valsiner points out that Lysenko's ideas were tested on broad scale, with poor results. In contrast, Soviet psychologists' parallel ideas were not tested at a broad scale. (p.104)

At the end of World War II, the USSR was triumphant, yet the allies' help—and increased contact with non-Soviets, both allies and enemies—threatened a loss of the Soviet fortress mentality and thus threatened the social system. The Cold War made it possible to reinstate this fortress mentality, and the Soviets began a witch hunt of "cosmopolitan" and "foreign" influences. Rubinshtein became a target: "Rubinshtein was found 'guilty' of studying human consciousness as that of an undefined person, rather than that of the 'Soviet new man'. His intellectual indebtedness to Western psychologists was 'unmasked'"(p.108). Other consciousness-oriented psychologists were also criticized, including Leontiev (pp.108-109), setting the stage for neo-Pavlovian dominance of psychology a few years later (p.109).

Looking back at the end of this chapter (Ch.3), Valsiner concludes that "By trying to build the 'new man' in the USSR [psychologists] have actually rebuilt their way of thinking"—that is, they had internalized the idea of developing the New Man, and that had shaped Soviet psychology along developmental lines (p.116).

Chapter 4 is about Vygotsky. I've discussed Vygotsky extensively on this blog, so I'll just note some things here. First, Valsiner argues that "even when relying on Russian thinkers of the past, Vygotsky was in fact advancing ideas that had originated internationally, rather than in the isolation of an independent 'Russian genius'" (p.123). Second, Vygotsky made "few, but selective and highly adequate references to different aspects of Marxist philosophy," specifically Engels' and Marx's claims about labor and active human transformation of nature. "Vygotsky's acceptance of Marxist philosophy was not that of an ardent follower. Instead, he was an active creator of Marxist psychology" and didn't use Marxist slogans demagogically (p.125).

Confronted with non-developmental methods, Valsiner says, Vygotsky had to construct his own method (p.128). This method had three characteristics:

• distinguished between analysis of a thing and analysis of a process
• overcame the separation of description and explanation by emphasizing that historical analysis affords the potential to explain psychological processes
• emphasized the presence of "fossilized" behavior in psychological observations (pp.130-132)

Skipping a bit: Valsiner notes that Vygotsky's work underwent three waves of translations: 1920-1939; 1961-1981; and 1984-on (p.154). All the basic aspects of Vygotsky's cultural-historical approach were available in English by 1939 (p.155), but the uptake was thin. By the second wave of translations, however, cognitive interests had been reestablished in Western psychology, and Vygotsky's works gained interest under that interpretation. "Thanks to the efforts of Michael Cole and his colleagues to publicize Vygotsky's name among American psychologists, a potpourri of Vygotsky's ideas, collected together from different sources and linked in ways judged to fit the 'recipient' culture better than the original ... appeared in English" (p.155; Valsiner is referring to Mind in Society).  

Valsiner presents a table showing citations to Vygotsky in the West, demonstrating that most of the citations are to the second-wave translations. "this table ... illustrates the canalized nature of references to Vygotsky in English-language publications over the period covered" (p.160). In fact, the vast majority of the cites are to Thought and Language (1962 edition) and Mind in Society (p.161), both of which were altered to fit the recipient culture!

The problem that Valsiner describes here persists even today. Just this morning, I saw this thread on Twitter about a supposed Vygotsky quote. Literally as I was about to write the above two paragraphs, @Ilyenkov_et_alia verified that the quote doesn't even show up in its supposed source! Perhaps it's a paraphrase of a paraphrase—the quote shows up in several quote repositories, but doesn't seem to be in Vygotsky's actual work at all. As Valsiner implies, Vygotsky is too often used in the West to validate established thought rather than being understood as its own internally coherent system. 

Moving on. Later in the book, Valsiner discusses issues of cognitive development and activity theory. Valsiner notes that activity theory emerged from the Kharkov school, linking Vygotsky's cultural-historical school with contemporary psychology (p.216). For Leontiev, activities are "forms of human relationships with the object-world, distinguished and guided by their motives" (p.217). Importantly, "there are two distinctions between Leontiev's view and Vygotsky's. First, the development of meaning and sense in ontogeny is subsumed under the primacy of activity. Secondly, Leontiev explicitly bases his concept of 'personal sense' on Marx's writings, rather than those of Vygotsky (who in his turn borrowed it from Paulhan" (p.218). Later, Valsiner notes that activity theory's approach to interaction "is by far less directly related to empirical investigation" than work based on Bekhterev; "If [activity theory] addresses empirical issues, these are studied mostly by observational and rarely by experimental means, and usually by investigators for whom the action-theoretic approach is in addition to their personal or humanitarian interest in practical issues concerning children" (p.241). 

Speaking of children: A bit later in the book, Valsiner recounts some developmental research on children in the 1920s, noting that this research describes how Soviet children were socialized for latent, "conditional animosity" in which the USSR was considered the in-group and capitalist countries were considered the out-group (p.264). Another study investigated indoctrination in children, finding that the peer group develops the prescribed worldview as a result of active interaction with the environment (p.266). These studies were seen by their authors as positive, not sinister—understandable, given the uncritical acceptance of partiinost' and the program to develop the New Soviet Man. 

Valsiner gives us a little more detail on the two Central Asian expeditions that Luria led, including Koffka's participation in the second one (1932). Unfortunately for Luria, this expedition happened in the early 1930s, just as the Soviets were redefining the problem of non-Russian cultures within the USSR—"all cultures of the USSR were now becoming homogeneous as the 'Soviet people'" (p.298). "In such a context of social meanings, paedological and psychological research on non-Russian cultures in the USSR became at best irrelevant, and at worst contrary to the Soviet social-political goals of the 1930s. Thus, comparative-cultural research issues vanished from Soviet psychology for about forty years" (p.298). Eventually, in 1974, Luria took the report of the trip out of a drawer and published it, inspiring one of his students, Peeter Tulviste, to replicate and extend this research (p.299-303). Tulviste's work "extends the largely linear view of cognitive development, held by Luria and Vygotsky in the 1930s, to a multi-linear one" (p.302). 

There's more to the book, but let's leave it there. As with Valsiner's other work, this one is extremely valuable for understanding the development of psychology in the Soviet Union. If you're interested in that general topic, or the more specific topic of activity theory, I highly recommend it.

Reading :: Studies in Expansive Learning

Studies in Expansive Learning: Learning What Is Not Yet There
By Yrjo Engestrom

This 2016 book is based on Engestrom's work since 2007—as he says in the preface, all chapters except Chapter 1 are based on articles that he authored or coauthored 2007-2013. (Chapter 1 was written specifically for this book.) Collectively, these treat the theory of expansive learning first proposed in his 1987 Learning by Expanding (recently republished by Cambridge).

In Chapter 1, "Introduction: Learning Sciences at the Threshold of Expansion," Engestrom sets the stage for the rest of the book. Specifically, he situates the book in relationship to the learning sciences, a notion that he dates to the 1991 founding of the Journal of Learning Sciences by US cognitive scientists (p.3). Although the learning sciences should address learning in all contexts, Engestrom notes, in actuality they largely ignored learning outside of school (p.4). Applying an activity analysis to the learning sciences themselves, Engestrom argues that the field encountered "recurring dilemmas"—and "When an activity system is primarily riddled by persistent dilemmas rather than critical conflicts and double binds, it implies that the developmental cycle of the activity system is at the stage of a primary contradiction. A primary contradiction appears as something problematic and uncomfortable but not yet as a crisis that unavoidably demands transformative action and radical redesign" (p.5). And "the primary contradiction of any modern activity system is seen as a specific variation of the general primary contradiction of the socioeconomic formation of capitalism, namely the contradiction between the use value and the exchange value of commodities" (p.6). In this case, the primary contradiction manifests in the Rules component: academic researchers must fulfill exchange value (external success markers such as publications, grants, tenure), but the rules of the zone of proximal development point to use value ("Take risks to change the world—in other words, keep your eyes on the needs of people when you conduct research") (p.6).

Engestrom moves on to secondary contradictions in the learning sciences, noting their inability to address the ongoing commercialization of education (p.6); the relative absence of runaway objects, which can be "powerfully emancipatory" (p.7); and "the weak recognition in the learning sciences of social movements as sites and subjects of learning" (p.7). (Note: Engestrom sees objects as phenomena, not as analytical anchors for an analysis.)

"If communities of learning sciences are to cope with these types of mismatches and forces," Engestrom continues, "they need to step out of their comfort zone" (p.7). He recommends expansive learning, which is indicated by "the expansion of the object of the activity system involved in the learning effort" (p.8). This expansion involves three dimensions: the socio-spatial, the temporal, and the political-ethical (p.8).

Engestrom proffers his theory of expansive learning, then forecasts the rest of the book.

In Chapter 2, "Whatever Happened to Process Theories of Learning?", Engestrom notes that in the social sciences, processes are often reified and attributed with causal powers (p.12). Recently, "process theories have been replaced by approaches and theories that try to capture the essence of learning through the lenses of the learning situation (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991), the learning environment (e.g., Jonassen & Land, 2000), and the learning dialogue (e.g., Mercer & Littleton, 2007)" (p.13). Engestrom identifies the requirements for a process theory of learning:

First of all, it describes a sequence of actions or events that is assumed to have some generality. Second, it presents a general rationale or principle that explains why the actions or events follow one another in a certain order. Third, it presents a causative mechanism that generates the transitions from one action or event to the next one. (p.13)

Fourth, although they "are always to some extent prescriptive" (p.13), a process theory "must denounce universalism and specify just what type of learning it aims at describing, explaining and promoting—and on what historical and cultural grounds" (p.14). Fifth, instruction and learning must be understood as "dialectically intertwined," and thus the intended and actual processes must be contrasted (p.15).

CHAT uses process theories of learning (p.23), including Davydov's theory of learning activity and Engestrom's theory of expansive learning. Engestrom compares these in a table (p.33).

In Chapter 3, "Studies of Expansive Learning: Foundations, Findings, and Future Challenges," Engestrom considers how expansive learning has been applied. In contrast to learning theories based on metaphors of acquisition and participation, his is based on the metaphor (obviously) of expansion (p.37). Expansive learning also has two factors that make it current: "the emergence and escalation of social production or peer production" and "the emergence and increasing presence of global threats and risks, or 'runaway objects' such as global warming and pandemics (p.40). Expansive learning is founded on the "theoretically consequential distinction between action and activity. Expansive learning is movement from action to activity" (p.40).

As an aside, Engestrom nicely sums up a distinction with which I have been recently working: in an activity system,

the object is both resistant raw material and the future-oriented purpose of an activity. The object is the true carrier of the motive of the activity. Thus, in expansive learning activity, motives and motivation are not sought primarily inside individual subjects—they are the object to be transformed and expanded. (p.41)

A little later in the chapter, Engestrom connects expansive learning with several intellectual currents, three of which I'll highlight: (1) Il'enkov's "dialectical method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete" (p.42), Bateson's Learning III (pp.43-44), and Bakhtin's multi-voicedness/heteroglossia (p.44). He concludes that "expansive learning is an inherently multi-voiced process of debate, negotiation and orchestration" (p.44).

In an activity system, he adds, "contradictions are the necessary but not sufficient engine of expansive learning in an activity system" (p.46).

Skipping forward in this long chapter, let's just mine a few quotes. In his discussion of the researcher's role in an expansive learning study, Engestrom says that "In linear interventions the researcher aims at control of all the variables. In formative interventions, the researcher aims at provoking and sustaining an expansive transformation process led and owned by the practitioners" (p.64). This description of the researcher's role closely matches that of participatory design; recall that at the same time Engestrom was formulating his theory of expansive learning in the mid-1980s, Bodker was separately applying Leontiev's activity theory to participatory design projects. Both Bodker and Engestrom departed from Leontiev's investigatory methods, but in the same direction—toward what is here called "formative intervention."

Engestrom also catalogues critiques of expansive learning from three directions: within CHAT; near CHAT; and the Marxist dialectical tradition (p.66). Within CHAT, Engestrom notes Lompscher's and Ruckreim's criticism that activity theory is "captive to the historically passing medium of print and writing" (p.66); he argues, however, that their argument "ignores the internal contradictions of objects in capitalism" (p.67). Within the broader Marxist tradition, he acknowledges Avis' point that expansive learning studies tend to marginalize political agendas (p.71); yes, he agrees, transformations often do not require large-scale confrontation, but they are not necessarily "conservative practice" either. He points to his ongoing discussion of the essential contradiction between use-value and exchange-value in capitalism (p.72). Contra Avis, he adds, those who study expansive learning have allied with radical social movements; his examples include organic farmers; open source software; and local food production in Japan (p.74). (None of these seems particularly radical to me.)

Under the heading of "future challenges," Engestrom notes that "expansive learning is a process of concept formation" and "complex, consequential concepts are inherently polyvalent, debated, incomplete and often 'loose'," with partial versions being produced by different stakeholders (p.74; Leontiev would likely disagree, a fact that implies how far CHAT has moved from second-generation activity theory). "Concepts evolve through cycles of stabilization and destabilization," meaning that "complex, consequential concepts have expansive potential" (p.75).

Finally, echoing a word of caution that Engestrom has given elsewhere, he adds that the theory of expansive learning analyzes both "outward" (in "fields or networks of interconnected activity systems") and "inward" (with "issues of subjectivity, experiencing, personal sense, embodiment, identity and moral commitment") (p.77). "Indeed, there is a risk that the theory is split into the study of collective activity systems, organizations and history on the one hand and subjects, actions and situations on the other hand" (p.77).

In Part II of the book, Engestrom presents several studies. Chapter 4, "Enriching the theory of expansive learning: Lessons from journeys toward co-configuration" explores the notion of co-configuration:

an emerging historically new type of work that relies on (1) adaptive "customer-intelligent" product-service combinations, (2) continuous relationships of mutual exchange between customers, producers and the product-service combinations, (3) ongoing configuration and customization of the product-service combination over lengthy periods of time, (4) active customer involvement and input into the configuration, (5) multiple collaborating producers that need to operate in networks within or between organizations and (6) mutual learning from interactions between the parties involved in the configuration actions. (p.81)

Co-configuration is characterized as transformative learning; horizontal and dialogical learning; and subterranean learning (the latter connected to mycorrhizae) (p.82). Engestrom proffers cases: a bank, a health center, and a high-tech company. In his discussion, he mentions Bodker and Andersen's 2005 paper on multi-mediation, which he considers important but "somewhat opaque" (p.94). In response, he proffers a set of epistemic levels of mediational artifacts, answering these questions:

• Where to?
• Why?
• How, in which order?
• In which location?
• Who, what, when?
• What? (p.95)

In the cases, Engestrom notes that the expansive learning processes "took the shape of constructing and using new mediational concepts and tools in multi-layered constellations or instrumentalities" (p.96). 

In Chapter 5, "From learning environments and implementation to activity systems and expansive learning," Engestrom proffers the activity system as an alternate way to understand learning environments. He draws from Cole to discuss context as threads of interaction, intertwined—the view of CHAT (p.107). CHAT's crucial insight inherited from Vygotsky, he says, is the dialectic between object and mediating artifact (p.107). After discussing a case study of a middle school, he concludes, "an activity system is an open system and its lateral interplay with other activity systems ... makes possible surprising empowerments and surges of agency" (p.116).

In Chapter 6, "Process enhancement versus community building: Transcending the dichotomy through expansive learning," Engestrom notes that "there is a deep gap and mutual hostility between two important rhetorics of transformation in organizations and activity systems": between "process efficiency rhetoric" and "community building rhetoric" (p.117). He cites Adler and Heckscher's analysis as a "rare attempt to overcome the opposition" between the two, but thinks they underestimate the epistemological divide between them (p.121). Activity theory is offered as a resource for overcoming the divide: "In today's world, communities are increasingly beginning to take the shape of weakly bounded and mycorrhizae-like formations which rely on stigmergy, negotiation and peer review as coordinating mechanisms" (p.123), while "the object holds the community together and gives it long-term purpose" (p.123). He illustrates with the case of a medical team.

Let's skip to Chapter 9, "Wildfire activities: New patterns of mobility and learning." Here, Engestrom "argues for a historical perspective on mobility and learning," specifically in "social production or peer production," in which "mobility takes the shape of expansive swarming and multidirectional pulsation, with emphasis on sideways transitions and boundary-crossing" (p.193). Examples include birding, skateboarding, and disaster relief. Such "wildfire activities" offer few awards; take excessive time and energy; and involve high risk. Yet they "renew themselves without much deliberate and centrally organized effort" (p.197). They are discontinuous, dispersed, distributed-yet-coordinated, quickly adopted, open, and use-oriented (p.197). Engestrom characterizes them as "virtuous swarming" (p.197).  

Engestrom connects these wildfire activities with mycorrhizae. (Yes, this suggests a wildly mixed metaphor, but he is keeping consistent with the terms he established previously in separate articles.) And he links both wildfire activities and mycorrhizae with Adler and Heckscher's discussion of Gemeinschaft (see also Tonnies) (p.198). Learning in wildfire activities, he concludes, involves:

1. Learning by swarming—a concept that involves rethinking the ZPD.
2. Learning by building mycorrhizae communities.
3. Constructing concepts that stabilize cognitive trails.
4. Experiencing high-stakes involvement.
5. Learning by combining improvisational adaptation and long-term design
6. Learning by holiptic monitoring. (pp.206-207)

I've covered a lot of ideas here, and haven't even touched some of them (such as the notion of an argumentative grammar in Ch.10). Suffice it to say that Engestrom covers a lot of concepts, drawing from many different literatures, but connecting these back to the fundamental precepts laid out in his 1987 theorization of expansive learning. If you're interested in activity theory, expansive learning, or just the question of how we can understand learning in 21st-century workplaces, certainly pick this book up.

Reading :: The Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
By Klaus Schwab

A couple of colleagues recommended this book to me in December, so I picked it up and read—really, skimmed—it a few nights ago. It's a fast read that covers ground with which you'll be familiar if you've read my recent book All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks.

Essentially, the author—who is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum—argues that "technology and digitization will revolutionize everything, making the overused and often ill-used adage 'this time is different' apt. Simply put, major technological innovations are on the brink of fueling momentous change throughout the world—inevitably so" (p.9). Specifically, he identifies technological megatrends that "leverage the pervasive power of digitization and information technology: physical, digital, and biological (p.14). Each of these is expected to hit a number of tipping points by 2025, such as wearable clothes, unlimited free storage, and a trillion sensors connected to the Internet (pp.25-26).

The author explores anticipated impacts of these megatrends for the economy, business, the international order, society, and the individual (Ch.3).

However, the path that this book takes seems well-worn. If you've read much on technology trends in the past two decades, there aren't many surprises here. And in covering such a large sweep, the book doesn't manage to drill down deeply in any of its many topics.

If you're looking for a broad overview of near-term trends and potential changes, you might find this book to be useful—in February 2017. By February 2018, I doubt it will seem fresh.

Reading :: Vygotsky and Research

Vygotsky and Research
By Harry Daniels

Harry Daniels has a series of books on Vygotsky, including both monographs and collections. This one is a monograph—a succinct overview of Vygotskian theory, Vygotsky's own research, and research strands influenced by it (including distributed cognition, situated cognition, and activity theory). It's a rewarding overview of Vygotsky-related research traditions that will be of interest to neophytes as well as those who are well acquainted with the relevant literature.

Since I'm in the latter category, I'll skip the first two chapters, which cover Vygotsky's theory and his circle's research.

Chapter 3, "The sociocultural tradition," tackles studies that have been labeled "sociocultural"—a term that tends to be applied in different ways, but that generally refers to "its focus on the development of an understanding of the social formation of mind" (p.51). One critical issue that is considered in this literature is whether social and individual worlds are separable or indivisible (p.51). In a handy summary table, Daniels identifies scholars belonging to weak and strong views about inseparability (p.55): Wertsch, Cole, and Valsiner are on the weak side, while Rogoff, Lave, Wenger, Matusov, and Shweder are on the strong side. Daniels also discusses mediation, quoting Wertsch's ten claims concerning mediation (p.61). Finally, Daniels discusses something that has interested me lately: whether Vygotsky was a dialogical thinker, as Wertsch sees him, or a dialectical one. Daniels lays out Wegerif's (2007) argument that the dialogic should be understood as an ontological principle (pp.65-66). (This find alone made the book valuable for me, since I have been looking for just this sort of discussion.)

In Chapter 5, "Situated action and communities of practice," Daniels reviews "a move from research that takes its major preoccupation as being that of cognition to a more concerted interest in action" (p.91). After overviewing this body of work, he reviews some of the major criticisms of it. Here, he quotes Valsiner (1988)'s citation analysis of Vygotsky, noting that a large percentage of Vygotsky cites in English are to flawed translations (p.107; n.b., I am currently finishing up that Valsiner book). According to Valsiner and others, Western interpreters have subsumed Vygotsky's original intentions under their own priorities (p.107).

In Chapter 5, he also returns to the question of separability that was earlier aired in Chapter 3. He quotes Matusov as asserting that Vygotsky himself advocated the separability thesis, while Bakhtin advocated the non-separability thesis. According to Matusov, Vygotsky ethnocentrically regarded Western societies as the most advanced, while Bakhtin was more concerned with how people constitute each other and participate in unending dialogue (pp.113-114).

In Chapter 6, "Activity theory and interventionist research," Daniels identifies AT with the inseparability thesis, but airs the criticism that it has not yet come to terms with that thesis methodologically (p.115). Daniels briefly reviews the Vygotsky-Leontiev difference, noting Cole and Gajdamaschko's argument that Leontiev did not fundamentally repudiate Vygotsky so much as complement his work (p.116). He also notes the difference between Western and Russian approaches to AT, quoting Hakkarainen's claim that Western CHAT sees activity as an object of scientific study and management, while the Russian activity approach sees it as an explanatory principle (p.117). Daniels then overviews CHAT, identifying five principles:

• expansive learning
• dialogicality and multivoicedness
• boundary objects, translation, and boundary-crossing
• cognitive trails
• labor power (pp.123-131)

Re the latter, he critiques Engestrom's identification of the primary contradiction of capitalism as use-value vs. exchange-value. Daniels says that Engestrom sources this primary contradiction in Leontiev. However, Daniels says, this view does not adequately take into account Marx's identification of two classes of commodities: (a) a general class of commodities and (b) labor-power (p.130). Daniels argues that "Education, training and work-related learning are forms of social production of labour-power potential," which he says suggests that "the 'meta-object' of a workplace activity system is the expansion of labour-power potential" (p.130). He says that "the development of Vygotsky's activity theory in the subsequent work of Leontiev and Engestrom is rooted in a concern with the collective aspect of labour-power" (p.130, his emphasis). And he charges that "object-oriented activity is rendered contradictory because it constitutes both directly functional work and the social production of labour-power, which is always riven with contradictions" (p.131). 

In Ch.7, "Institutions and beyond," Daniels continues his discussion of activity theory in its application to institutions. Among other things, he argues that "activity theory needs to develop tools for analysing and transforming networks of culturally heterogeneous activities through dialogue and debate," citing Engestrom and Miettinen 1999 (p.164). He proposes a diagram to examine dominance in networks of activity systems over time (p.167). 

Overall, this is a dense and highly rewarding book. It focuses heavily on Western interpretations of Vygotsky, which may not be a plus to all readers, but it provides a nuanced and wide-ranging overview of these interpretations. If you're interested in any of these Western applications of Vygotskian thought, definitely pick this one up. 

Reading :: Community and Society

Community and Society
By Ferdinand Tonnies

Tonnies has been referenced often in the books I've read over the last decade, but perhaps most prominently in Adler and Heckscher's work, where they make full use of his distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). When a collaborator brought this distinction up again, I decided I should invest the time to read the source material.

Tonnies published his first version of the book in 1887 (he was 32 at the time). Like Marx, Tonnies interpreted history in terms of economics, arguing that the development of trade, the modern state, and science, Gemeinschaft characteristics gave away to Gesellschaft characteristics.

So what are Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft? The distinction is similar to the one between mechanical and organic solidarity in Durkheim. Gemeinschaft relations are "real and organic," while Gesellschaft relations are "imaginary and mechanical" (p.33). (Confusingly, Gemeinschaft roughly corresponds to Durkheim's "mechanical solidarity" and Gesellschaft to Durkheim's "organic solidarity.")

"All intimate, private, and exclusive living together" is "life in Gemeinschaft," while "Gesellschaft ... is public life" (p.33).

Tonnies argues that Gemeinschaft emerged first, from "the assumption of perfect unity of human wills as an original or natural condition which is preserved in spite of actual separation," "because of dependence on the nature of the relationship between individuals who are differently conditioned" (p.37). It is characterized by mother-child relationships, husband-wife relationships, and sibling relationships (p.37). But beyond blood, it can also involve neighborhood (e.g., physical locality) and friendship (e.g., common mind/goals) (p.42). In Gemeinschaft, understanding is tacit by nature (p.49). Gemeinschaft is focused inward, toward the community (p.79).

In contrast, Tonnies argues that Gesellschaft is an "artificial construction of an aggregate of human beings which superficially resembles the Gemeinschaft in so far as the individuals live and dwell together peacefully," but "they remain united in spite of all separating factors"—in contrast with Gemeinschaft, in which they "are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors" (pp.64-65). In Gesellschaft, "goods are conceived to be separate, as also are their owners" (p.65), so individuals engage in exchanges rather than gifts (p.66). Also in Gesellschaft, "Contracts must be executed" (p.75). Tonnies quotes Adam Smith as arguing that every man becomes a merchant (p.76). Gesellschaft is focused on the outward world and on trade (p.79). Indeed, it exists for merchants and capitalists, and in this frame, those who are not merchants or capitalists are slaves (p.83). Paradoxically, he claims, this line of thinking leads to the abolishment of slavery, since all people are free agents—and one cannot have a Gesellschaft relationship with nonpersons (p.84). (I am reporting this argument, but I am not sure that I adequately follow it.)

The structure of Gesellschaft is described by three acts: "(1) the purchase of labor, (2) the employment of labor, (3) the sale of labor in the form of value elements of the products" (pp.100-101).

In Part II, Tonnies writes taxonomically, contrasting natural and rational will. Natural will, he says, is just thinking, while rational will involves metacognition (p.103). He breaks will down further into "vegetative will" (material stimuli); "animal will" (perceptions, sensory stimulation); and "human will" (thoughts and verbal sensations; mental stimulation) (pp.106-108). Later, he sums up: Gemeinschaft involves natural will, including liking, habit, and memory. Gesellschaft involved rational will, including deliberation, decision, and conception (p.134).

The rest of Part II similarly breaks things down into binaries, always binaries. Organs vs. tools (p.135), freedom vs. choice (p.136), women's feelings vs. men's intellect (p.151). On the latter, Tonnies claims that by entering the workforce, women are developing their rational will (p.166).

In Part III, Tonnies discusses "the sociological basis of natural law" (p.171). He argues that under Gemeinschaft, every relationship is "either potentially or intrinsically, a higher and more general self"; under Gesellschaft, every relationship is "the beginning and the potentiality of a superimposed artificial person" (p.177). So Gemeinschaft is a "personality of united natural wills" and Gesellschaft a personality of "united rational wills" (p.177). He sums up with this contrast:

Gemeinschaft:

• Natural Will 
• Self
• Possession
• Land
• Family Law

Gesellschaft:

• Rational Will
• Person
• Wealth
• Money
• Law of Contracts (p.181)

One other contrast implied by the above: you can leave Gesellschaft, but you can't leave Gemeinschaft (p.204). In fact, when women gain Gesellschaft-like independence, "marriage and marital community of wealth degenerate [sic] into civil contract" (p.204). 

Broadening the focus, Tonnies turns to the State, which he says has a "dual character": on the one hand, it is Gesellschaft, a free association governed by law; on the other, Gemeinschaft, a unity in which all participate in the will of the state through being dependent on it (pp.216-217). 

Finally, in the conclusion, Tonnies argues that he is contrasting two social orders: one resting on harmony of wills, one on convention and agreement (p.223). He further argues that these social orders emerged in different periods of history (p.231; cf. Durkheim; Engels). Ultimately, Tonnies believes that this progression leads to "a socialism of state and international type ... inherent in the concept of Gesellschaft" (p.234). 

And that's the book. Frankly, I liked Tonnies less than I did Adler and Heckscher's gloss of his work. Like roughly contemporaneous work (e.g., Durkheim), it seemed overly binary in its argument, sorting a variety of characteristics into opposing camps. I understand how the argument is based on economics, but that argument devolves into the familiar teleological argument that was in the air in the late 1800s-early 1900s. 

Nevertheless, it's an important distinction that has exerted great influence on later works. As a historical document, it's well worth reading. If you're interested in community, society, sociology, or the influence of economics on any of those three, take a look.

Reading :: Institutional Ethnography

Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People
By Dorothy E. Smith

Dorothy Smith has been cited in a strain of work in professional communication studies dealing with ethnographic research. (I think the first reference I saw to her work was in one of Dorothy Winsor's articles.) Smith, a sociologist, published this 2005 book to explain and summarize institutional ethnography:

The aim of the sociology we call 'institutional ethnography' is to reorganize the social relations of knowledge of the social so that people can take that knowledge up as an extension of our ordinary knowledge of the local actualities of our lives. It is a method of inquiry into the social that proposes to enlarge the scope of what becomes visible from the site, mapping the relations that connect one local site to others. Like a map, it aims to be through and through indexical to the local sites of people's experiences, making visible how we are connected into the extended social relations of ruling and economy and their intersections. And though some of the work of inquiry must be technical, as mapmaking is, its product should be ordinarily accessible and usable, just as a well-made map is, to those on the terrain it maps. (p.29)

That is, IE takes a partnership orientation with its participants, like participatory action research (PAR).  Smith contrasts IE with what she characterizes as the typical mode of research in sociology, in which "everyday and local events" are interpreted "in terms of a framework originating in sociological and political economic discourse," a framework that displaces actual people: "Categories such as 'sociocultural differences,' 'social class,' and 'racial status' become the subjects" and "the potentially unruly (from the point of view of sociological discourse) actualities of people's everyday lives are selectively appropriated" (p.31; cf. Latour's similar argument).

In contrast, an IE "would begin in the actualities of the lives of some of those involved in the institutional process and focus on how these actualities were embedded in social relations, both those of the ruling and those of the economy" (p.31). So "research would begin by building accounts of their situation" and experiences; those accounts then define the ethnography's direction and further steps by identifying the "problematic." And Smith continues:

The institutional regime they confront would be explored from their perspective; their perspective and experience would organize the direction of the ethnographers' investigation. (p.31)

I pulled this quote because, reading the sentence within the paragraph, "they" and "their" seem to refer to "researchers" and "institutional ethnographers" in the previous sentences—but in the clause after the semicolon, "their" seems to be referring to the participants instead. I'm pretty sure Smith meant the latter interpretation.

In any case, "Institutional ethnography begins by locating a standpoint in an institutional order that provides the guiding perspective from which that order will be explored. It begins with some issues, concerns, or problems that are real for people and that are situated in their relationships to an institutional order" (p.32). From there, IE maps out social relations "so that the larger organization that enters into and shapes it becomes visible" (p.35).

Smith notes that IE may sound like Burawoy's extended case method. But the extended case method uses its investigation of people's lifeworlds to discover how the system objectively works—that is, it assumes a system that governs these individual lifeworlds. IE, on the other hand, has "no prior interpretive commitment"; "it means to find out just how people's doings in the everyday are articulated to and coordinated by extended social relations that are not visible from within any particular local setting and just how people are participating in those relations" (p.36). Ultimately, Smith sees IE as an alternate sociology, not just a methodology (p.50; see also pp.54-55). (Again, compare with Latour.)

Later in the book, Smith draws on Mead, Voloshinov, Vygotsky, and Luria to explore the relationship between consciousness and subjectivity (p.75). Interestingly, she characterizes the "text-reader conversation" as active, but "peculiar and unlike conversation in that the text remains the same no matter how many times it is read" (p.105)—I can see what she's trying to say, but I don't think this characterization is adequate within the Mead-Voloshinov-Vygotsky tradition. However, it underpins a later argument in the chapter on texts and institutions, where Smith claims that "it is the replicability of texts that substructs the ruling relations; replicability is a condition of their existence. ... Replicable and replicated texts are essential to the standardizing of work activities of all kinds across time and translocally. It is the constancy of the text that provides for standardization. ... Texts suture modes of social action organized extralocally to the local actualities of our necessarily embodied lives. Text-reader conversations are embedded in and organize local settings of work" (p.166).

In tying discourse to data, Smith later argues that when interviewing a participant, "I'm not interested in whether his account is an accurate telling of events; I am interested, rather, in his experience and how he tells it and in the traces of social relations and organization present in it" (p.138).

Later, Smith mentions grounded theory, charging that it tends to universalize the researcher's intuitions (p.160).

Overall, I found this book to be interesting, but not a revelation. It might be that Smith's earlier publications have impacted qualitative research methodology to the extent that I'm already familiar with her propositions before reading them—but much of this argument seems similar to work with which I'm already familiar, from Whyte to PAR to participatory design to Latour. And as I mentioned above, the characterization of texts seems lacking, especially the notion that texts (a) remain the same in a sociologically meaningful way and (b) in themselves standardize activities across time and space. I'm open to a weak form of that argument, but Smith seems to be pushing for a strong form that severs texts from ongoing meaningful activity.

Nevertheless, it's a solid book packed with details about IE's theory, methodology, and practice. If you're interested in qualitative research in general and IE in particular, I recommend it.

Reading :: Russian Psychology

Russian Psychology: A Critical History
By David Joravsky

In my recent readings on Soviet psychology, I kept seeing references to this 1989 book by historian David Joravsky, so I finally picked it up. It's 474 pages, not including footnotes. Fortunately, Joravsky has a wry and cynical writing style that keeps things interesting.

At the time of writing, the USSR was in its death throes (it collapsed just two years later), and Soviet writers were still portraying Soviet psychology as outstripping the West. Joravsky, in contrast, doesn't pull his punches. In the Preface, he levels the charge that in the early 1930s, Soviet orthodoxy forced diverse psychologists to "fuse into one, new, distinctively Soviet, truly Marxist psychology, which could be concretely described only in a negative way: it would not be like any of the existing schools, which were hopelessly 'bougeouis'." And

Soviet psychologists shrank to fit within that framework, leaving grand theory to official ideologists and concentrating on empirical studies that might not be objectionable to the officials. Vygotsky's disciples retreated to the mental effects of brain damage and to child development studies rather like Piaget's, though constrained to deny the similarity. Their claim of a unique 'historico-cultural' approach was and remains an empty slogan. They could not give it substance without entering minefields of invidious comparisons between group mentalities, such as 'primitive' v. 'civilized,' or 'lesser' nationalities v. 'great' ones. (p.xvi)

Further, he notes that when the Bolsheviks "forcibly advanced workers and peasants into positions of authority ... issues of intellectual substance were entangled with lines of authority and opposition, within a political culture that tended more and more toward the equation of intellectual rectitude with place in the hierarchy of power" (p.xviii).

With that marker set, let's venture into the book itself. Joravsky begins with a general discussion of psychological science and ideologies (Ch.1) and social science and ideologies (Ch.2) before getting into the history of psychology in Russia, which begins pre-Revolution with Sechenov (Ch.3). Rather than reviewing the entire discussion, I'll focus on points related to the history of activity theory.

For instance, Joravsky discusses how Chelpanov, who organized a graduate program in psychology at Moscow University, was later characterized by Stalinists as an "idealist"—a misleading label, since Chelpanov was eclectic and tolerated diverse ontologies and approaches (pp.108-109). His graduate student Kornilov, the son of a provincial bookkeeper who became a village teacher before entering his undergraduate studies (1905) and graduate studies (1910; see p.113), would in 1923 depose him as director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology (p.224). (Note: Kornilov was the same age as Stalin and Trotsky; p.222.)

In the early 1920s, Chelpanov's eclecticism was tolerated—in fact, Freud and Piaget were translated and discussed frequently throughout the early 1920s, with authors (such as Luria) exploring how to harmonize them with Marxism (p.217). But by the late 1920s, "genuine discussion of Freudianism was swamped by one-sided denunciations," and by the mid-1930s, other Western psychologists (such as Piaget) got the same treatment (p.217).

The 1923 congress of psychoneurologists was a pivotal point. At this congress, Kornilov appealed for a Marxist psychology; Chelpanov objected in print. In the fallout, Chelpanov was dismissed from the directorship, replaced by Kornilov (p.224). Recounting the second congress in 1924, Red Virgin Soil praised "venerable scientists such as Bechterev, who were pictured as trying sincerely to accommodate their theories with Marxism, and ... young scientists on the way to dialectical materialism, even if they were hesitating to make the decisive commitment. L.S. Vygotsky was offered as the prime example of that young, interested but hesitant type" (p.225). Chelpanov was meanwhile "pictured as the chief 'idealist' opponent of Marxism in psychology" (p.225).

Ironically, Kornilov, like Chelpanov, was an eclecticist (p.229). Vygotsky regarded Kornilov's dream of a synthetic Marxist psychology as being "at odds with messy history" (p.229).

Meanwhile, the philosophical debate between mechanists and dialecticians raged through the 1920s. As Joravsky sums it up: "In the 1920s the ideological establishment turned against positivist versions of Marxism, in favor of a neo-Hegelian version, and then turned against it too" (p.230). The Deborinites (dialecticians) ignored both Kornilov and Vygotsky, and in fact "had nothing substantial to say about any school of psychology" (p.232). This gave psychologists some maneuvering room. Joravsky notes that in Vygotsky and Luria's book outlining their historio-cultural approach to psychology, they "borrowed heavily and quite respectfully from such Western authorities as Piaget and Freud, showing that the Westerners' discoveries blended nicely with a much smaller amount of findings by Soviet psychologists, and with a very light dusting of references to Marx and Engels" (p.233). The authors "still had an irenic attitude toward 'bougeois' psychologists," and "to the furious Stalinists of the 1930s that evidence of professional legitimacy was evidence of pseudo-Marxism" (p.233).

Joravsky notes that Freud's "claim of a unified vision was too obviously in competition" with that of the "Bolshevik ideological bureaucracy"—even though Marxist thinkers such as Vygotsky and Luria "tried to turn the competition into complementarity" (p.235).

But, contra Joravsky, note that in 1927 Vygotsky denigrated Luria's use of Freud. This is one of the question marks in Joravsky's book for me. The other is just a few pages later, when he attributes Freudianism: A Critical Sketch to Bakhtin (p.238)—it was published under Voloshinov's name—and notes in a footnote that "Bakhtin published some of his work under that name" (p.505). Well, no: Voloshinov was a real person, a member of the Bakhtin Circle. Many have claimed that Bakhtin ghostwrote the books of Voloshinov and Medvedev, a claim that Bakhtin neither confirmed nor denied in the 1970s. (Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and Medvedev published four books in 1927-1929.)

Back to the history. Joravsky notes Luria's winding journey, beginning in studies of personality and ending in the safe area of defectology (p.246), and points out how Luria's autobiography erases his Jewishness (p.247)—an ethnic background that endangered his career due to Russian prejudices.

Luria's autobiography is unquestionably accurate in noting that his research interests were shaped for fifty years by 'the central themes that guided my initial efforts' during the Civil War. He merely neglects to specify one of those 'central themes': political caution, a scientist's effort to avoid ideological conflict, and a consequent retreat from field after field of research interests as ideological authorities extended their interest to and in them. (p.248)

Later Joravsky notes that Luria followed a lifelong pattern established in the 1930s:

He went on with his autonomous work in neuropsychology to the extent that he could do so in submissive cooperation with Stalinist authorities. He was closer than he imagined to the mentality of a peasant—not the illiterate type who sharply distinguished between his tsar and the tsar of a superior people; the type with enough understanding of superior people to tell what follows from their words. (p.369) 

Joravsky also takes up Vygotsky. His account of Vygotsky's early life (p.255) is vague and short—recall that this book was published in 1989, before many of the biographies reviewed on this blog. Vygotsky debuted on the broader psychological stage in 1924 at the Second Psychoneurological Congress (p.259 — recall that Chelpanov was replaced by Kornilov shortly after the first Congress in 1923). Here, Vygotsky used Marx's passage on the spider and the architect to argue that psychological reductionism was not required by Marxism (p.259). As Joravsky notes, Luria and others were already using subjective methods, but Vygotsky showed them how to defend these methods and justify their disagreements with reflexology (p.261). Perhaps, Joravsky says, Kornilov deserves credit for recognizing Vygotsky's rhetorical abilities (p.261). Vygotsky also had this advantage: "Vygotsky was the only one [of the psychologists with whom he worked] who had thoroughly absorbed Marxism" (p.261). Yet his talents also included prevarication:

Vygotsky went further than mere withholding of troublesome detail. He prevaricated on occasion. It is startling to compare his semi-private writing on 'the psychological crisis' with the rah-rah review of Soviet psychology that he published in a 1928 volume celebrating the social science during the first decade of Soviet power. (p.265)

Joravsky goes on to criticize Vygotsky's work:

When he came to cognitive psychology, he did preliminary theorizing far more than experimental research. And when he came to preach 'historico-cultural' psychology, his theorizing was quite thin and derivative. He ostentatiously put the 'historico-cultural' slogan at the center of his program for psychology, yet he worked at the subject only belatedly and briefly. His first published venture was little more than a survey that he and Luria brought out in 1930, mostly reviewing theories of Western psychologists: Studies in the History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive, Child. Stalinists immediately attacked the scheme of behavioral evolution that it presented as 'essentially bourgeois.' Vygotsky's defensive and aggressive responses—restricting his freewheeling thought, attacking 'bourgeois' elements in Piaget—belong to the Stalinist 1930s. The point here, respecting the 1920s, is that even then, in a relatively liberal atmosphere, Vygotsky resembled most other Soviet psychologists in his paradoxical combination of insistence that social psychology be the center of the discipline and his evasion of serious work at the center. Even this extraordinarily venturesome thinker tended to stand clear of an area charged with ideological and political passion, while solemnly calling on Soviet psychologists to make it their focus. (pp.266-267)

Indeed, Vygotsky was interested in developing Marxism as a general methodology and philosophy of science (p.361) and seemed most interested in "an awkward layering of metapsychology over an authoritarian pragmatism" (p.363).

Re the attacks on Vygotsky and Luria's 1930 book: in June 1931, the "Institute's party cell" rebuked "'the "apolitical culturist" ... psychology of Vygotsky and Luria" as well as the reflexologies of Kornilov and Bekhterev (p.358). Vygotsky and Luria's 1931-1932 study of Uzbekis was similarly received poorly, and for similar reasons: it was read as applying primitive or childish qualities to Soviet peoples (pp.364-367). Stalinism could not tolerate "anything like a serious cultural-historical approach to psychology"—although studies of children and disturbed adults were tolerable (p.367). By 1932, Vygotsky's optimism was gone; he couldn't even quote Trotsky and Kautsky, since those names were no longer to be uttered positively (p.364). Similarly, "Luria retreated from historico-cultural psychology to intense study of mental disorder in brain-damaged patients" (p.368); he also adopted the Stalinist style of writing after 1931 (p.369). Joravsky notes with astonishment that when Luria finally published the Uzbeki study, forty years later, "he retained the swagger of the Stalinist style" and "stolidly ignored the forty-year delay" (p.369—but I personally think that this retention is due to Luria simply publishing the manuscript without revision). Finally, Leontiev focused on child development and "avoided other possibilities of historico-cultural inquiry" (p.369).

By 1938, Vygotsky was dead, his nascent field of pedology had been denounced (see p.347), and Stalin had published "his celebrated essay on dialectical and historical materialism... [which was] too inane for any use but tub-thumping celebration of the great author" (p.326). "Developing almost entirely as a part of pedagogy, psychology became a purely descriptive science" (p.353).

Joravsky's account goes on from there, but let's call a halt. In terms of the cultural-historical school, Joravsky mainly notes Luria's tactics for survival and Rubinshtein's distaste for the school.

Overall, I did find this book to be rewarding, but flawed. Joravsky's cynicism is healthy, but sometimes I think it leads him to undervalue or superficially evaluate the works of the cultural-historical school. And the two question marks, indicated above, undermine my faith in some of the other facts Joravsky recounts. I'll use this book, but with some caution. If you're interested in the history of Soviet psychology, I certainly recommend reading it.