Reading :: Psychologies in Revolution

Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History

By Hannah Proctor

I continue to be fascinated by histories of Soviet psychology, specifically the cultural-historical school. So when I ran across this book, I had to read it. Although Luria is best known internationally as a pioneer of neuroscience, Proctor primarily reviews Luria’s early work (1920s-1940s) and his later accounts of it (most of his books on this work were not published until well after Stalin’s death in 1953). 

Specifically, Proctor rereads Luria’s accounts in historical context, looking for places where his research participants’ utterances overflow or cut against Luria’s explanations. She organizes the text by presenting different figures in Luria’s studies, each of which gets a chapter: 

• The criminal (covered in The Nature of Human Conflicts)

• The “primitive” (illiterates in Central Asia, covered in Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations)

• The child (covered in Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child)

• The aphasic (covered in The Man with a Shattered World)

• The synaesthete (covered in The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory)

Proctor argues that 

Somewhat confusingly Luria’s research was animated by two distinct and indeed contradictory understandings of history: on the one hand, he treated individual human development as a recapitulation of civilisational development (the ontogenetic maturation from childhood to adulthood was treated as a counterpart to a phylogenetic progression from primitivism to civilisation), while on the other hand he emphasised the contingent impact of specific cultural and political experiences on individuals. (p.10) 

And that 

the pages of Luria's books attest to continued incongruities between the psychic territories he attempted to navigate and the maps he employed; incongruities that ultimately, I argue, led him to develop a new mode of scientific writing that found a different way of describing the diverse psychic terrains he encountered. (p.12)

This new mode was Luria’s so-called “romantic science,” a qualitative case study that drew heavily on literary conventions:

It was only in these case histories that Luria developed a form of scientific writing capable of fully attending to the utterances and experiences of the people he dedicated his career to observing, understanding and treating. Unlike the majority of his publications, these works are written in a detailed and empathetic style alert to the particularities of the conditions of the people they describe rather than seeking to relate those people’s consciousness to some abstract normative ideal. (pp.22-23)

(Luria’s two famous romantic science case studies are The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a Mnemonist.)

Luria’s path was made difficult because of his (Vygotskian) quest for what Proctor calls an “advanced” human subject, whom readers of this blog will recognize as the New Soviet Man, standing at the peak of Vygotsky’s peak psychology:

Luria’s research was premised on normative assumptions about individual human development. He argued that the ‘advanced’ human subject was the result of various developmental trajectories: the biological evolu-tion of the species from animal to human, the cultural development of societies from ‘primitivism’ to ‘civilisation’ and the maturation of the(‘healthy’) individual from baby to adult. An interest in tracing the progression from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms of thought united Luria’s seem-ingly diverse strands of work. At the apex of his mountain of development stood the ‘civilised’ or ‘cultured’ [kul’turnye], educated and healthy adult. Luria, however, had little to say directly about this ‘advanced’ figure. He could only discern its outline, as though it stood on a high mountain silhouetted in front of the glaring sun. Instead, he looked at the base in order to explain the route to the peaks. (p.8)

With this introduction, Proctor goes into the chapters centered around the different figures. All are fascinating, but let’s zero in on Luria’s expeditions to Central Asia in 1931-1932. I’ve discussed these on my blog. Luria and Vygotsky hoped to demonstrate that through literacy, people develop psychological tools or mediators that in turn provide them with capabilities including abstract thinking. In his expeditions, Luria found differences in how illiterate, semi-literate, and literate Uzbeks reasoned about categories and even whether they saw optical illusions. Yet some of these results were disputed by Kurt Koffka, the Gestaltist psychologist who accompanied the 1932 expedition, and the expedition itself was condemned by the Party for supposedly denigrating the mental capacity of Uzbeks. Luria put the research away, only to publish it 40 years later as Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations.

Proctor is fascinated by how the direct quotes from the Uzbek subjects contradict Luria’s interpretations and suggest different meanings, as well as Luria’s apparent ignorance of the political pressures that might affect the Uzbeks’ answers. She expresses these as paradoxes and ironies:

“Paradoxically, however, Luria conceived of the imposition of a particular mode of life and thought as a form of liberation. For Luria, the transition to abstract thinking did not represent a process of assimilation but of emancipation.” (p.74)

“Ironically, the lack of illusions that Luria identified in Uzbek people was precisely what he hoped could be overcome through the transition to the socialism [sic]. For Luria, illusion, fantasy and imagination were all crucial components of ‘advanced’ thinking.” (p.79)

Luria was hampered, as Proctor sees it (and I agree), by a teleological understanding of history, which he also applied to individuals:

“A loosely Marxist conception of history as advancing teleologically through a series of economic stages was combined with the Leninist conviction that such development could be artificially accelerated, conforming to what Francine Hirsch describes as ‘state-sponsored evolutionism’” (p.82)

“Luria followed the Communist Party line, conceiving of his work in explicitly anti-imperialist terms and insisted that psychological propensities were not biologically determined. Luria’s rejection of biological essentialism was, however, coupled with a continued emphasis on cultural superiority framed in terms of historical development: a hierarchical framework that undermined his professed egalitarianism. Despite defining itself as anti-imperialist, his progressive framework for understanding Uzbek society bore comparison to the frameworks employed by Western anthropologists, whose work he drew on heavily. Luria frequently drew parallels between Uzbekistan and other supposedly ‘backward’ places, including other regions of the USSR as well as communities in Africa. For all his self-proclaimed attentiveness to cultural specificity, his emphasis on the interchangeability of ‘backward’ places understood cultural difference in terms of temporal development.” (pp.83-84)

And perhaps most importantly:

“Despite insisting that no way of seeing is ‘a natural and inevitable achievement of the human mind’, Luria’s understanding of difference distributed humanity across one developmental slope and was thus implicitly value laden. … Luria placed Uzbek people, culturally if not biologically, lower on the rungs of a single developmental ladder.” (p.85.)

Proctor provides some historical context about how Stalinism dealt with the cultural diversity of the USSR: it embraced ethnic dress and superficial customs while leading diverse ethnic groups to a substantively homogeneous Communist future. “Luria’s contradictory depiction of Central Asia, which simultaneously cel￾ebrated tradition and progress, was in keeping with this state discourse” (p.88).

Finally, she notes how Luria seems oblivious to the implied power differences. In addition to the fact that the expedition traveled with security services, Luria “wilfully overlooked the historical situation of the encounter where any translation from Uzbek into Russian implied a power relation” (p.91). 

Later, Proctor adds: “Stalin depicted the fight between old and new ways of life, tradition and modernity, capitalism and communism, by imagining the latter as a vul￾nerable newly born baby. Luria’s experiments in Central Asia celebrated  the birth of the new but bore witness to the tenacity of the old (and it was for this reason that his work was eventually denounced).” (p.116). She adds:

as was evident in his experiments in Central Asia, a contradiction existed between Luria’s discussions of abstraction as a cognitive capacity, on the one hand, and as a research methodology, on the other. For Luria not only advocated abstraction as a mode of thought but simultaneously insisted that a properly Marxist approach to psychology should treat cognition as time bound and historical. (p.251)

And 

In the context of the Central Asian expeditions, Luria’s declared sensitivity to cultural particularity was complicated by his continued imposition of pre-existing normative frameworks onto the Uzbek people he encountered, muffling the specificities of their utterances. Classical scientific abstraction returned through the back door. (p.251)

Proctor does similar close readings with the other figures. Toward the end of the book, she argues that Luria was stymied by the abstract, clinical style of writing he used to recount his research as well as the impulse to provide dialectical syntheses. But in later life, his two “romantic science” books moved from synthesis to a recognition of fragmentation (p.227). “The majority of Luria’s publications described people in relation to abstract ideals, whereas his ‘romantic’ works sought to understand the people they described on their own terms” (p.228).

I personally found this book very rewarding, both for its deep connections among historical events and for its thoughts on how Luria’s “romantic science” represented a more capacious genre (based on Soviet realism) that could better address the ambivalences in his data. If you’re interested at all in Soviet psychology and specifically the cultural-historical school, definitely pick up this book. 

Reading :: Fundable Knowledge

Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology

By A.D. Van Nostrand

This book came out in 1997, when I was in graduate school, and I remember my officemate (the remarkable Mark Zachry) recommending it to me. Mark’s advice is always good, but I was deep into reading other things at that point, so I put it off. Now, over 25 years later, I finally got to it.

The book is part of the Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Society series edited by Charles Bazerman. It’s the second in the series, right after Dorothy Winsor’s Writing Like an Engineer (Dorothy was our professor at Iowa State). Small world, right? Unfortunately I never met Van Nostrand, who seems like he was a very smart guy who knew his way around the defense industry. But maybe it’s best that I waited a while before reading this book — I think I appreciate it more from where I am now, after having studied lots of industries and especially technology commercialization.

Van Nostrand brings a genre perspective to the defense procurement industry, discussing how the industry works, how it documents and argues, and what makes knowledge fundable. “Fundable knowledge is generated by a large social system that functions by impersonal directives,” he explains (pp.1-2). It is a commodity, specifically a futures commodity, since it is sold before it is produced (p.2). The acquisitions system is composed of several overlapping domains (p.10).

To better understand fundable knowledge, Van Nostrand draws on Steven Kline’s summary of four uses of the term technology:

• “artifacts: aspirins, bombs, telephones, airplanes”
• a “system of producing artifacts, some combination of resources and methods, such as an assembly line or a set of laboratory procedures”
• “the skills or techniques implicit in the production system; a certain manufacturer, for example, is said to have the technology to produce a given artifact”
• “a whole social system, or collection of systems, for using an artifact. If the artifact is an airplane, for example, the technology of its use includes laws and regulations, airports and schedules, insurance, contracts, fuel supply, training, even frequent flyer bonuses” (pp.30-31)

This is a very useful taxonomy, and crisply rearticulates what people in studies of science and technology (SST) are trying to say when, for instance, discussing infrastructure (Star and Ruhleder) or the unclear bounds of a technology (de Laet and Mol). 

He defines knowledge this way: “Knowledge is information to which a certain value has been added in order to serve some given purpose, some need to know” (p.33). And “producing knowledge is essentially a process of interpreting information, thereby adding value to it” (p.34). Later in the book, he goes farther, stating that “buying and selling knowledge produces knowledge” (p.58). And “knowledge exchange is a communicative act wherein a sender’s stock of knowledge actually increases through the act of communicating it” (p.62). I am not enthusiastic about characterizing knowledge as “stocks,” but I appreciate the idea that knowledge is constructed in practice. (Peter Smagorinsky has a good relevant article on the idea that we understand a text by recomposing it.) 

In the second chapter, Van Nostrand turns to the question of markets. He notes that “The price of goods is also the consequence of a peculiar culture within the defense acquisition system. This culture tends to favor initially low cost estimates followed by cost overruns after production is underway. Moreover, price is always subject to a federal cost-accounting procedure that distributes fixed costs evenly over short production runs, which accounts for those infamous $200 screwdrivers and $800 coffee pots” (p.66). Van Nostrand also summarizes the differences between the terms “action” and “activity” in the defense program: an action is “a certain type of transaction, one that results in a contract or a grant, or in the modification of either instrument,” while an activity “is an organization” (p.70). We find other specific quirks in defense procurement language, but as he reminds us, “language belongs to the people who use it” (p.70).

Skipping forward, in Chapter 9 he lightly analyzes Defense Science and Technology (DST) as an activity system (p.141), and he brings in Swalesian genre theory to map 8 transactional genres (p.148) and document cycles (p.150). Based on this work, he analyzes the cyclical flows of knowledge in the procurement industry, based on the cyclical stabilization and destabilization of knowledge (pp.190-191). 

Finally, he concludes, “to market a product is to provide an organizational context for selling it” (p.214).

Overall, I found this book to be really useful. I must confess that it is not that engaging a read. But Van Nostrand opens the door to understanding technology commercialization in general and defense procurement in particular, and he lucidly builds the blocks of his argument. I’m sure I’ll return to it as I continue to think through both technology commercialization and knowledge. If you’re interested in these topics from a rhetoric and writing angle, definitely pick up this book.

Reading :: The Soul of a New Machine

The Soul of a New Machine

By Tracy Kidder

Just a quick acknowledgement that I finally read this book, which is frequently used to illustrate Latour’s points in Science in Action. Since Latour used it, I was expecting an ethnography, but instead it’s an engaging, fast-paced account of how a team of engineers at Data General designed a superminicomputer (the Eclipse MV/8000) and brought it to market in a remarkably short amount of time. 

This 1981 book is a terrific read, introducing us to different people and different phases of the project, helping us to understand what drives them and how their organization has been set up, and also showing how Data General exploited the spirit and curiosity of these young engineers (mostly early 20s). At one point, an salaried engineer working 80 hours a week discovers the pay stub of a contractor in the wastebasket — and realizes that this hourly contractor, working overtime, is making twice as much as the engineer. After some thought, the engineer and his manager decide to burn the pay stub so that the other engineers won’t see it.

Kidder plays up the Machiavellian machinations of the group’s manager, and I can see how this figure caught Latour’s imagination at that point in his career. But I was also intrigued by the accounts of debugging, which brought back my memories as a computer science student in 1988-1991 (a few years after the events in the book). Although I didn’t work on hardware, I certainly spent many late night sessions, or all nighters, poring over code, tracking down bugs, and figuring out how to do things that (I imagined) no one else had done in quite the same way. So I identified with the engineers and their motivations, even as I wanted to tell them to hold out for better compensation and to work fewer hours. 

The book is definitely a product of its time, and some of the reported statements that seemed colorful or interesting to Kidder ring as blatantly racist and sexist today. For instance, at one point, an engineer walks through a computer expo with Kidder, pointing out how the IBM booth had “just the right number” of women and Blacks. (In contrast, the Data General team had just one woman, and although Kidder doesn’t mention race, he is quick to mention which engineers are Jewish.) So sometimes the book makes uneasy reading. But still fascinating reading. If you want to get a sense of what drove the incredible leaps in computer technology in the late 1970s and early 1980s, definitely pick up this gripping book. 

Reading :: Perezhivanie, Emotions, and Subjectivity

Perezhivanie, Emotions, and Subjectivity: Advancing Vygotsky’s Legacy

Ed. by Marilyn Fleer, Fernando Gozalez Rey, and Nikolai Veresov

Lev Vygotsky has been incredibly influential in educational psychology and beyond, primarily through the works of his instrumentalist period (e.g., Mind in Society) and those that at least gesture toward the thoughts of his holistic period (e.g., Thought and Language). Both deal primarily with cognition. But Vygotsky was also interested in the question of personality. His works on personality were much thinner, but he saw it as a critical part of an overall psychology. In this context, he used the terms perezhivanie (singular) and perezhivaniya (plural) to refer to units of the formation of personality. Vygotsky either used the term of referred to it in writings as early as “Concrete Human Psychology” (1929) and as late as a 1935 lecture on pedology. In these instances, perezhivanie relates to how individuals’ personalities develop as they process emotions about experiences they undergo. But as Peter Smagorinsky argues elsewhere, perezhivanie “remains more of a tantalizing notion than a concept with a clear meaning” (2011).

In this collection, Fleer, Gonzalez Rey, and Veresov aim to clarify and develop the concept. The book starts with a lengthy introduction by the editors, followed by four parts: Perezhivanie (focusing on the concept), Emotions, Subjectivity, and New Challenges and Perspectives. 

Of these, I found the opening chapter and the first part the most useful, since they develop the concept more fully. 

The introduction, “Perezhivanie, Emotions, and Subjectivity: Setting the Stage” (Fleer, Gonzalez Rey, and Veresov) reviews past use of the term, then theorizes it: “Rather than examining emotions, perezhivanie and subjectivity as the result of internalised operations, this chapter puts forth the view that these concepts must be understood as a generative system inseparable from the individual. … It is through understanding the human psyche as the unity of social, personal, and environmental characteristics, that it becomes possible to advance on the essence of the three concepts that are the focus of this book, and thus to generate new understandings of what might constitute a contemporary reading of perezhivanie, emotions and subjectivity” (p.1). Later in the chapter, they state that “perezhivanie is a tool (concept) for analysing the influence of the sociocultural environment, not on the individual per se, but on the process of development of the individual” (p.10). Whereas social determinism might assume that the environment directly determines the child, this approach understands the environment as influencing the individual’s development — a dialectical process in which the individual becomes a unique subject. The authors link this process to Vygotsky’s discussion of the social situation of development (p.10). “Perezhivanie is a unit of analysis of a social situation of development,” they argue, a unity that cannot be divided into social and individual parts (p.11). They also use the analogy of the individual as a prism that refracts (not reflects) the environment (p.11). (Recall that Vygotsky’s late work was attacked by Stalinists in part because it did not hew closely enough to Lenin’s reflection theory.) 

In Part I, chapters review perezhivanie from various angles. Mok overviews interpretations of perezhivanie, including from activity theory. Veresov distinguishes between perezhivanie as an empirical phenomenon and a concept, in the process digging deeply into the works of Vygotsky. Hammer extends this theoretical perspective to the domain of early childhood educational settings. 

In Part II, “Emotions,” authors get into actual studies that mobilize the concept of perezhivanie. Fleer examines “how everyday interactions in a preschool environment can contribute to the emotional development of young preschool children,” specifically “when engaged in self-directed activities where teachers and other children spontaneously respond to the dramatic moments found in everyday play practices” (p.85). March and Fleer theorize emotional regulation as “the dynamic interplay of interpsychological and intrapsychological functioning during moments of emotional expression” and draw from “the findings of a close study of the conditions for supporting one child’s emotional regulation” (p.105). Chen also examines emotional regulation, this time in “everyday family life” (p.129). Fleer and Gonzalez Rey examine “two case examples, where a medical model is used to explain children’s behaviours, resulting in a deficit view of the children” and provide an alternate reading grounded in perezhivanie (p.145).

In Part III, “Subjectivity,” authors provide a mix of theory pieces and studies. Gonzalez Rey “outlines a general picture of the phenomenon of subjectivity in Soviet psychology” by examining an eclectic set of writings, then proposes understanding “subjectivity as a system that permits to understand how the historical experiences and the simultaneous contexts of the individual current’s [sic] life experiences appear together in new units of subjectivity, defined by the author as the intertwined movements between subjective configurations and subjective senses” (p.173). He contrasts this understanding with that of dialogical psychologists such as Matusov (p.186-on). Gonzalez Rey and Martinez discuss the epistemological and methodological challenges posed by perezhivanie and sense, challenges that were not met when these concepts were “not in focus during Soviet times,” and proposes “the Qualitative Epistemology on which the basis of a constructive interpretive methodology is developed as a path for the study of subjectivity from a cultural-historical standpoint,” using a case study to illustrate (p.195). Gonzalez Rey, Martinez, Rossato, and Goulart use two case studies to explore understanding processes and subjective units as “new qualitative subjective productions” rather than reflections (p.217). 

In Part IV, “New Challenges and Perspectives,” the authors think about the future development of perezhivanie. Fleer, Gonzalez-Rey, and Veresov write the sole chapter of this part (the final chapter). Here, they “theorise the relations between the concepts introduced, building new theoretical insights, but also explicitly introducing methodological challenges yet to be faced by the cultural-historical community as they engage in research which draws upon these concepts” (p.247).

In all, the collection has more coherence and consistency than most collections I’ve read. That’s probably due to the fact that the editors have a hand in nearly all of the chapters. At the same time, that coherence means that the book is more narrowly focused than it might have been otherwise. For instance, as someone who uses activity theory and Vygotskian concepts to investigate groups and organizations, I wanted to see how perezhivanie might be used to understand group experiences of adults within these systems —- but in their case studies and illustrations, the authors focus almost exclusively on the development of individual children ass they go through social experiences. 

Still, this collection was critical to my understanding of the concept of perezhivanie. I’m not convinced that Vygotsky left us enough to reconstruct his theory of perezhivanie per se, and I’m also not convinced that he even had an articulated theory, but the authors have provided a coherent, credible picture of what a reasonable Vygotskian theory of perezhivanie would look like. If you want to understand this concept, if you would like a solid platform on which to build your own thoughts or studies of perezhivanie, this book is a must-have.

Reading :: Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Place-Based Transformations and Transitions

Ed. By Allan O’Connor, Erik Steam, Fiona Sussan, and David B. Audretsch

I read this collection a very long time ago, probably in mid to late 2022, but it got buried in all of the other stuff I was trying to do at the time. That’s too bad because this edited collection gave me a lot of insight into entrepreneurial ecosystems and the research surrounding them.

What’s an entrepreneurial ecosystem? In the chapter “Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: The Foundations of Place-Based Renewal,” the editors explain: “In abstract terms, central to the definition of entrepreneurial ecosystems are (entrepreneurial) agency and (human made) context (I.e., the ecosystem), especially the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction (I.e. rules of the game, institutions) that shape the presence and form of important entrepreneurial ecosystem elements such as capital, labour and knowledge” (p.3). They understand the ecosystem as undergoing transformations and transitions (p.3), and thus they say understanding entrepreneurial ecosystems requires systems thinking (p.4). They add, “entrepreneurial ecosystems are an inherently geographic perspective” because they “focus on the cultures, institutions, and networks that build up within a region over time rather than the emergence of order within global markets” (p.5). In this perspective, the focus is the entrepreneur, not the firm (p.5); the entrepreneur is considered a central player or leader in creating and maintaining the entrepreneurial system (p.8). The authors overview differences between entrepreneurial ecosystems and the related concepts of innovation ecosystems and innovation systems (industrial districts, clusters, triple helixes) (p.8). 

The other contributions to the book flesh out this vision. For instance, in “Deconstructing the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept,” Daniel et al. review contributions to the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept, including business networks and systems thinking, and overview other concepts related to strategic innovation. In “Institutional dynamism in entrepreneurial ecosystems,” Fuentelsaz et al. incorporate institutional theory and business life cycle theory into the analysis of ecosystems. And in “Measuring entrepreneurial ecosystems,” Stam takes a systems view, reviewing the systemic conditions that are at the heart of such an ecosystem (p.175) and identifying some possible measures for those conditions (table 1, p.179). 

I found this collection to be a good introduction to the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems, although not entirely accessible for someone (like me) who is not steeped in the economics and business literature. If you’re looking for an introduction to EE concepts, it’s a good place to start.

Reading :: A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt

A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt: Gramsci, Vygotsky, and the Egyptian Revolution

By Brecht de Smet

In this book, de Smet uses Gramsci’s political theory and Vygotsky’s cultural psychology to analyze the 2011 Egyptian revolution. 

De Smet’s thesis is that we should see social movements as developmental, as forms of human activity and as sites of learning (p.5). He argues that to understand mass agency of an emancipatory movement, we must understand how that movement is constructed as an actor (p.26). And that in turn requires challenging the lines that have been drawn between individual and collective forms of subjectivity: between mind and body, between subject (“the agent of cognition”) and object (“the external world of things”) (pp.28-29). In Chapter 2, de Smet brings us through the thought of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Voloshinov, Gramsci, Ilyenkov, and Vygotsky, arguing that the individual subject is also an effect of collective subjects (p.34). The conclusion is that “the dichotomy between the individual and the collective has been revealed as an opposition between modes of subjectness, which share the same substance: human activity” (p.37).

This line of thought brings us to the concept of the subject (Ch.3), which de Smet traces through Goethe,, Hegel, and Marx and on to figures in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Specifically, he argues that in an uprising (such as the Egyptian uprising under consideration), activities are determined and rendered meaningful via continual reference to the collective (p.39). That is, “a subject is not an undifferentiated thing, but an ensemble of different parts that function as a whole” — various individuals “were determined and rendered meaningful not by their own, particular position, but by their continuous reference to the whole, I.e., the people” (p.39). De Smet also stipulates that “a subject is something that emerges, grows, develops, and dies” and “an understanding of the formation and development of a subject such as the people requires a degree of abstraction that should not lapse into simplistic reductions or empty generalizations” (p.39 — he gives the example of statistical analyses of demographics). 

In Chapter 4, he turns to CHAT, noting that Vygotsky studied “the behavior and consciousness of the individual subject,” approached as a gestalt (p.48) — but this gestalt was rooted in Goethe, Hegel, and Marx, and thus “the complex behavior and consciousness of the individual subject could not be grasped directly as a totality — the unfolding of its understanding had to be mediated by an archetype” (p.49). He quotes Vygotsky, who argues that the unit of analysis must reflect the basic characteristics of the whole (p.49 — but see Valsiner’s claim that Vygotsky misinterpreted Brasov in making this argument). 

De Smet’s argument here creates problems in the analysis. We can stipulate with Vygotsky that an individual is always already social, and thus individual qualities will reflect (and constitute) cultural ones. But that does not mean that cultural and individual qualities are identical — otherwise individuals would be identical as well. Vygotsky actually discusses this question in a very underdeveloped way under the heading of perezhivanie, noting in one example how three brothers might develop differently based on the same issue. Thus, to explore cultural qualities through individual ones, we need a mechanism for ungrinding the hamburger: to reconstruct common cultural qualities from the individual’s qualities, or (to approach the question another way) to understand how individuals’ interactions continuously construct the cultural gestalt. This issue will become important in Ch.6.

Here, de Smet draws on Blunden’s work on the unit of analysis, arguing that the collaborative project is a collective subject (p.55). He concludes that “human subjects are nothing more than collaborative projects engaged in a developmental process, and emancipatory movements are but the politicized form of this ontology” (p.57).

In Chapter 5, “Class as Subject,” de Smet turns to the titular subject, arguing that “the main challenge for human emancipation is class society and its contemporary form of the capital relation and its state” (p.75). 

In Chapter 6, “The Modern Prince,” he examines the strike as a germ-cell. He appeals to Vygotsky, who examined children’s initial concept formation, and “transpose[s it] to the domain of proletarian sociogenesis” to argue that “at first, proletarian workplace subjectivities are subsumed under other subjectivities and only acquire some stability in the shared space of the labor process” (p.76). This move is warranted by de Smet’s argument in Ch.4 that since the individual is always already social, we can understand the social through the individual — we can, for instance, apply an individual child’s process of concept formation to an entire class of adults (the proletariat), according to de Smet. In recognizing that thought begins as intermental, we can apply children’s states of learning to social collectives — according to de Smet. Readers, I am very skeptical of this claim, which goes beyond analogy (such as the body politic as a Leviathan), instead actually attributing individual learning mechanisms to a social collective. It’s underexplored, it’s assumed rather than proven, and it skips across obvious differences between individual children and collectives of adults. De Smet continues this tack later in the chapter, discussing Vygotsky’s work on complexes: “Transposed to the domain of proletarian sociogenesis, this development needs a new organizational form to structurally connect and unite the various committees” — a trade union (p.80). He similarly “translates” Vygotsky’s insight that two lines of development can mature independently, then influence each other to yield a new line of development, applying this insight “to the domain of proletarian sociogenesis,” asserting that “the challenge for proletarian class formation is to combine and unite the economic and political lines of development” (p.84).

This “translation” (again, not an analogy) is fraught with problems in my view. That’s not just because of perezhivanie, but also because children’s development is not solely social. For instance, children demonstrably develop different capacities as the prefrontal cortex matures. Drawing a direct line (not a mere analogy) between a child’s development and the development of a collective subject seems hasty and requires much more thought, but by Chapter 6 (“Revolution”) the two are treated as equivalent. Here, revolution is not considered the object of the activity, but rather the activity itself, which produces a new collective subject: the people (p.105). By Chapter 22, de Smet is mobilizing the Zone of Proximal Development for describing the developmental trajectory of this collective subject (p.293). Note that Vygotsky used the ZPD to describe how a less developed individual (such as a child) can accomplish things beyond their capabilities with the help of a more developed individual (such as a teacher). But here on p.293, no more-developed subject is mentioned.

So I had concerns about this theoretical equivalence. But I also had concerns about the methodology, which is scattered across the book rather than being laid out in one place. De Smet interviewed many people involved in the uprising, but does not discuss basics of interview research such as triangulation, nor does he do much to explore differences in how these participants saw the uprising. Rather, he mainly focuses on agreement, since these participants function as avatars for the collective subject. We don’t get a good sense of how he selected participants, how or whether he looked for disagreements, how he compared their statements at the time of the interview with documents at other periods, or other measures we might expect from qualitative research. We don’t know how many people he interviewed or how many of these are represented in the quotes and characterizations throughout (or if he covered these basics, I can’t find them). Because these basics aren’t covered, we don’t have a good idea of whether de Smet’s conclusions come from his data — or whether the data were selected to illustrate his conclusions.

In sum, I wanted to like this book, but ultimately I was suspicious of both the theoretical work and the empirical work. If you’re looking for a book that ties CHAT to political consciousness and revolt, pick it up, but use caution. 

(10th anniversary of Topsight)

 I can't believe it's been 10 years since I published my methodology book, Topsight: A Guide to Studying, Diagnosing, and Fixing Information Flow in Organizations. (The link now goes to the revised edition, print version. There's also a Kindle version.)

Topsight was a labor of love for me. I had been teaching methodology courses since 2000, and by 2012, I had developed a set of resources and examples for my undergraduate students. These resources structured the process of conducting case studies in organizations so that students could see texts being taken up, used, and coordinated in action. They could then model these interactions in various ways. Over and over, I got to talk with students about the sometimes mundane, sometimes bizarre sites they investigated, and how to turn these observations into positive, beneficial ideas for change. 

By early 2011, I decided to write an accessible methodology textbook along these lines. But -- since I had already published two books with academic presses -- I decided to try self-publishing this one as an experiment. 

I published a set of blog posts about this process, which was pretty interesting in itself. And on January 15, 2013, I pulled the trigger. The book was live. 

What I expected and hoped was that the book would make this process clear and simple, encourage students and practitioners, and empower people to understand what texts do in organizations and how to improve those ecologies of texts. But I didn't expect people to begin citing this book in their methods sections. And they have -- as of today, Google Scholar says that Topsight has been cited 79 times. 

Since publishing Topsight, I've used it in undergraduate and graduate classes as well as professional workshops. But I have also seen it pop up on other professors' syllabi at both grad and undergrad levels. And I always feel blessed when it does. Case study research can be really scary and intimidating at first, but when you have a good method to follow (and improvise over, and improve on), it can be really exhilarating. And helpful to the people participating in your research as well. 

If you haven't checked out Topsight, it's only $7.99 on Kindle, or free with Kindle Unlimited. And if you have, I hope you have found it useful! 

Reading :: Adapting Values

Adapting VALUEs: Tracing the Life of a Rubric through Institutional Ethnography
By Jennifer Grouling

In this book, which is available as a free PDF at the WAC Clearinghouse, Grouling conducts an institutional ethnography to examine how two universities separately adapted Valid Assessment for Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics. These rubrics, designed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), were meant to provide a national assessment tool. Grouling is interested in how the rubrics are taken up locally at each institution, compromised and negotiated in actual practice, and thus create and reflect the social practices at these two different institutions (p.3).

The two institutions are quite different. "Oak University" is a small liberal arts university in a college town, with historical ivy-covered buildings. Its writing committee is chaired by a history professor. "St. Rita's College" is even smaller, an open-access school that serves factory workers and their children in the local community. It's housed in an old BP office building, and its writing program admin is a creative writer. Both WPAs have been tasked with assessment, and both turned to VALUE as a nationally recognized standard on which to base that assessment. 

With these two cases established, in Chapter 2, Grouling reviews the history of writing assessment, asking why rubrics are popular in assessment circles now. She reviews the racialized history of standardization in US education, the emergence of testing, and the development of rubrics in writing assessment. In the 1980s and 1990s, she notes, in composition terms such as "outcomes," "competencies," and "standards" became conflated in practice. With this background in place, she discusses the history of the specific rubrics under discussion, the VALUE rubrics.

In Chapter 3, Grouling turns to institutional ethnography, specifically rooted in scholars such as Dorothy Smith. In Chapter 4, she leverages this vocabulary to term the VALUE rubrics as "boss texts," which "function as a part of the institutional circuit of accountability within higher education" (p.57). Using the orientation of institutional ethnography, she analyzes a representative rubric, examines who has funded VALUE, and looks at how WPAs at the two universities used VALUE to establish legitimacy for themselves. 

Chapter 5 looks further into local adoption by examining to what extent each university could adapt the rubrics for their own use. Here, Grouling gets elbow-deep into the challenges that each university — and each WPA — face and how the rubrics had to be adapted to address those specifics. Those challenges include not just student preparation and institutional workings, but also quotidian power struggles and differences in how stakeholders understand education. "The AAC&U and higher education, in general, is not often aware of institutional circumstances like the ones these faculty engaged with on a daily basis," she observes (p.97). 

In Chapter 6, Grouling moves from the committee to the classroom, examining how rubrics (not the VALUE rubrics, which are only for assessment, but rather grading rubrics) were used in classrooms. Although she finds little direct connection between assessment and grading rubrics, she does note that the two sets of rubrics both function as "boss texts" (p.102). Interested in how rubrics get picked up and reused in different contexts, she uses rhetorical genre theory to analyze this translation movement. Specifically, she examines where faculty found their rubrics: from books, from peer professors, from departmental leadership, and nominally — but not in observed practice, she points out — from collaborative departmental workshops (p.115). 

In Chapter 7, Grouling explores individualism, racism, and the ecology of the writing rubric. She does this in part by comparing demographics of the two universities (Oak is majority White, St. Rita's is not), by comparing statements of her interlocutors, and by examining deficit assumptions and acculturationist assumptions as they play out in the rubrics themselves. For instance, although the VALUE rubrics are intended by the AAC&U to provide an asset-based model, these rubrics were adapted to the dominant deficit assumptions at St. Rita's. She takes a deep dive into stories that some of her interlocutors told about themselves and their approach to education, noting how those stories also reflected deficit assumptions and reflected committee tensions and power dynamics. 

In Chapter 8, the conclusion, Grouling concludes that rubrics "are boss texts that are inextricable from systems of power" (p.155). She resists providing a heroic or satisfying close to the narrative, but does encourage us to continue interrogating our own institutions and the roles of rubrics and other boss texts within them.

What did I think of the book? Although assessment and rubrics are not the most exciting things in the world, they are very important for higher education, and they hold out the promise of more standard, more fair ways to understand how educational institutions serve their students. Grouling's institutional ethnography underlines how difficult it is to deliver on such a promise. I can imagine productively using excerpts of this book alongside other resources when talking about assessment and grading rubrics—in discussions of assessment as well as in pedagogical discussions. 

At the same time, I didn't find many surprises here. Yes, assessment standards promise to do specific things across institutions, and yes, they fall short on these impossible promises because they are locally implemented. Yes, they get implemented by individuals with their own biases, ways of seeing things, constraints, and power dynamics. Yes, those individuals are often unaware of how systematic racism underpins their own assumptions about education. Education is a much messier and more conflicted enterprise than people like to think, just like so many other pursuits. 

But perhaps I am a little blase due to my long-term readings and recent writings, as well as my participation as what I guess could be called a WPA since 2016. It's worthwhile pointing out these dynamics and exploring them in an academic environment, and Grouling does this ably. If you're involved in writing assessment at any level, definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Your Hidden Superpowers

Your Hidden Superpowers: How the Whole Truth of Failure Can Change Our Lives
by Becca North

Becca North teaches courses in our HDO program. Over the holiday break, I saw her book in the Kindle store and decided to pick it up. That was a good move: This engaging book is full of inspirational stories about how people constructively deal with failure. If failure is something you struggle with, definitely consider picking this book up.

To explore failure, North draws on her own interviews with well-known people, biographies of historical figures, and psychological literature on failure. Based on these sources, North argues that failure does not have to be something to be avoided or ashamed of. Rather, it "can be a catalyst for bringing about what we yearn the most—to live a life that is true to ourselves" (pp.236-237). North sees failure as a way to reach authenticity as well as to improve, and she discusses how successful people handle failure in order to yield later successes.

As someone who regularly preaches the value of failure, I approve of the message. More than that, North's writing style is clear and accessible to readers at any level. If you know someone who struggles with accepting and processing failure, consider pointing them to this book. 

Reading :: How to Change Your Mind

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan

Just a quick review of this NYT bestseller. Michael Pollan conducts a "personal investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs" (according to the blurb on the back cover). That is, Pollan examines the history of psychedelic drug use and research, seeks out and interviews contemporary researchers in the area, and also interviews those who clandestinely serve as guides for those who take psychedelics for various reasons. He also describes his guided and unguided trips on LSD, psilocybin, and toad venom. Along the way, he examines how psychedelics use might fundamentally change one's outlook on the world.

The book is engaging enough, although I confess it strengthened my resolve not to use psychedelics. 

Pollan is a popular writer, and as such, he allows himself the freedom to explore and entertain various ideas that his interviewees have. For instance, in examining the history of psychedelics in the mid-20th century, Pollan repeats an idea of one interviewee, which is that psychedelics are sent by Nature to guide us through a period of crisis (p.124). "Could that be why nature has sent us these psychedelic molecules now?" Pollan asks, apparently feeling no obligation to actually answer the question (p.124). To me, Pollan's asides sound strikingly like Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants, in which Kelly posits a teleological argument in which technology is evolving into a self-sustaining system. It's worth noting that Kelly is name-checked in Pollan's book (p.183) as part of the Whole Earth Network, a group formed in Silicon Valley by Stewart Brand after Brand's experiences with LSD. "How much does this idea of cyberspace, an immaterial realm where one can construct a new identity and merge with a community of virtual others, owe to an imagination shaped by the experience of psychedelics?" Pollan asks -- another question that he is content not to answer (p.183).

In all, I found the book to be a bit of a frustrating read. It posed more questions than it answered, it entertained many ideas without trying to reconcile them, and although it told me a great deal about the history of psychedelics, I'm not sure it taught me anything concrete "About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence," as the subtitle promises. But if you're interested in a lay introduction to the history and use of psychedelics, this book is a good place to start.

(Upcoming)

I haven't posted anything here since the middle of 2022. That's not because I stopped reading -- I have just been busy. Very very busy -- with teaching, departmental service, and writing. 

Fortunately I'm on a research leave this spring, which means that you'll see an uptick in activity here as I clear out my backlog of book reviews. 

If you're used to seeing my updates on Twitter, I have bad news for you: After 15 years, I finally decided to delete my Twitter account. That was partly because of the recent changes to Twitter management, but I had also found that -- like Facebook before it -- Twitter had become more of a distraction than a positive place for conversations. For now, I'll be somewhat active on LinkedIn and I'll post announcements about new blog posts there.

In 2023, I have a few big anniversaries coming up: 

• June 5 will be the 20th anniversary of this blog. That's right, I will have been blogging book reviews for 20 years. It seems like yesterday that I drafted the first blog entry while waiting in line for The Matrix Reloaded at the Alamo Drafthouse. The movie was a huge disappointment, but the blog remains one of the most helpful things I have done for myself -- and hopefully it's helped others too.
• September 26 will be the 20th anniversary of my first book, Tracing Genres through Organizations. 
• And January 15 will be the 10th anniversary of my methodology book, Topsight. 

Enough looking back. Let's also look forward to a happy and productive 2023. 

Reading :: Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Second Reading)

Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union (Second Reading)

By Jaan Valsiner

A couple of months ago, I ran into a reference to this book when reading about the history of activity theory. After checking my bookshelf to verify that I didn't own it, I bought it used on Amazon. It was only later that I realized I had already reviewed it!

But that's fine. We get different things from a book on the second or third reading. This time, I got a few things, which I'll pull out and briefly discuss here.

First, Valsiner situates his discussion in reference to Kuhn, whose work on scientific paradigms has helped us to understand how science is framed and practiced in the West: specifically, scientific arguments appeal to evidence, not to heads of state or the populace (p.10). But "as will be seen in this book, not all social groups of scientists in cultural conditions other than those of Western Europe and North America have followed this rule in a stringent way. ... groups of in-fighting Soviet philosophers and psychologists of the 1930s did indicate their interest in using extra-scientific authorities as arbiters in their relationships" (p.11). Throughout the book, he demonstrates this dynamic in Soviet developmental psychology. This is a major theme of the book, but its import eluded me on first reading. At the same time, I wonder what Valsiner's 1988 analysis would have looked like if he had grounded it in Latour's (1987) Science in Action or his 1988 The Pasteurization of France, both of which suggest that Western scientists often do appeal to extra-scientific authorities, but in ways that cover their tracks.

Second, Valsiner writes at length about Mikhail Basov, whose work was cited by Vygotsky. Like Vygotsky, Basov made substantial contributions to Soviet developmental psychology, and like Vygotsky, he was associated with pedology, which was effectively and suddenly banned at the beginning of the Great Terror in 1936. "Unlike Vygotsky, however, Basov left behind no substantial group of followers to rise to positions allowing them to restate his relevance to developmental psychology once social circumstances after 1956 made this possible" (p.167). Vygotsky's associates had risen to leading administrative positions after 1956; Basov's associates "were located in relatively peripheral positions." Yet "the substantial role that Basov [played] in emerging Soviet psychology is in many ways comparable to that of Vygotsky in the theoretical realm, and may be considered to surpass him in the careful emphasis on empirical detail" (p.167). Contrasting the two is instructive, since it helps us to see science in general and psychology in particular not as the product of Great Men but as a set of collective achievements that are often attributed to Great Men—that is, it points toward a Latourean reading.

This brings us to the third thing that didn't make it into my first review, but that really struck me on rereading. Valsiner argues that when Vygotsky made one of his more famous arguments—that analysis should be conducted by analyzing into units rather than elements—that argument was based on a misreading of Basov. "Vygotsky reiterates that idea in different contexts in his writings, not always taking care to add a reference to Basov. ... [but] he claims to follow Basov in the emphasis on the analysis into units—the 'minimal gestalts' that preserve the systemic functioning nature of the whole from which the unit is derived, while abstracting from many concrete aspects of the original phenomenon" (pp.173-174). 

Vygotsky argued by analogy that water is H2O: two hydrogen atoms, one oxygen atom. To analyze water, then, we should examine H2O as our unit of analysis: it's the smallest particle that retains the characteristics of the whole (p.174). If you examine hydrogen or oxygen atoms by themselves, they have radically different properties from water, which is formed through their relationship. H2O is "an objective real element of water" (quoting Vygotsky on p.174). Vygotsky cites Basov as making this argument. (And let's note that this common analogy was also used by Engels in Dialectics of Nature to illustrate the nature of dialectics.)

But Valsiner says that Vygotsky gets this distinction wrong. "Basov, following Wolfgang Köhler, distinguished two kinds of 'structural elements' that can be observed in physical or psychological phenomena": (1) real, objective elements ("self-existent primary phenomena") and differential elements ("caused by purely quantitative modifications of a given phenomenon") (p.174; quotes in parentheses are quotations of Basov). By this differentiation, Basov says, H2 and O are the "objective" and "real" elements, while H2o is the "differential element" (p.175, quoting Basov). Valsiner concludes: "Vygotsky overlooked the structural-qualitative nature of Basov's separation of (and preference for) the 'real, objective elements' (components) of psychological processes" and instead considered the differential elements to be the real elements. Valsiner emphasizes: 

it is very evident that Basov emphasized the use of exactly the opposite kinds of unit—those of qualitatively different sub-components like oxygen and hydrogen which make up molecules of water as a qualitatively new structure. These are the 'real' or 'objective' units whose relationship gives rise to new quality. The relevance of 'differential' elements of the structure—the 'minimal qualities' of the substance (as a single molecule would be, relative to quantities of water that contain many similarly structured molecules)—was limited in Basov's view, as the above quote illustrates. (p.175, his emphasis)

Valsiner goes on to trace Basov's argument back to Köhler (p.175). He emphasizes that Basov and Vygotsky agree "in their emphasis on the holistic nature of phenomena" but they "differ greatly in the ways in which they conceptualize the analysis of the holistic phenomena" (p.176). Whereas Basov wanted to reduce the phenomenon into the minimal Gestalt state, then analyze the minimal Gestalt into its components or elements (p.179), Vygotsky wanted to avoid analyzing those elements for fear of losing the characterof the holistic system (p.178). 

Is this a significant drawback? On one hand, it would seem to be so if one is actually committed to a developmental analysis. From a developmental perspective, it seems pretty important to understand that H2O is produced by burning hydrogen—or that verbal thought is produced by the dialectic between thought and speech, as Vygotsky argued in Thought and Language. On the other hand, Vygotsky did make that argument—his focus on analysis into units did not keep him from analyzing pre-verbal thought and pre-rational speech. 

In sum, I'm glad that I forgot I had read this book—actually buying it and rereading it has helped me immensely as I continue to think through the legacy of Soviet psychology. It's one of the most rewarding books I've read in this vein, and if that subject appeals to you, you should definitely pick up a copy.

Reading :: A Billion Little Pieces

A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification
by Jordan Frith

I've been meaning to get to this book for a while. Here, Jordan Frith describes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags as an instance of "object communication, which I define as the ability of objects that have either no or little computing power to wirelessly communicate identifying data with infrastructure" (p.5). He argues that "with the growth of communicative objects—we need to pay more attention to infrastructure," understanding it as "that which communicates," and "Consequently, I position RFID as an infrastructure of identification that works simultaneously as an infrastructure of communication" (p.5). 

In the rest of the book, Frith places RFID among infrastructures of identification, which include bar codes; describes different types of RFID tags and their uses; debunks some of the more conspiratorial takes on RFID while acknowledging actual privacy concerns; and discusses the future of identification infrastructures. I learned a lot about RFID.

Frith's writing style is overall clear and enjoyable—sometimes I felt like I was reading a series of Scientific American articles instead of a book. I could easily see myself using this book in an undergraduate class on information and communication technologies. For a graduate class, I could possibly use it in conjunction with the science and technology studies (STS) that Frith sometimes cites, e.g., reading Chapter 1 alongside Bowker & Star and Haraway.

But the flip side is that I didn't think the book got very deeply into theory or methodology, and consequently it was hard to see the implications for either. Frith does draw on STS and STS-adjacent work, but doesn't get deeply into these sources, doesn't spend much time exploring their theoretical frameworks, and doesn't extend them significantly. 

But that's fine! The book had a clear mission and it achieved it. It's a great introduction to RFID, how it's affecting our lives, and how communication infrastructures change how we live and work. If you're interested in RFID, or in information and communication infrastructures, definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology

S. L. Rubinštejn and the Philosophical Foundations of Soviet Psychology
By T.R. Payne

I've often read that Leontiev's activity theory borrows heavily from the theory of S.L. Rubinshtein, whose work loomed large in Soviet psychology. But not much of Rubinshtein's work has been translated into English, and I continue to be monolingual, so I have not been able to investigate these claims directly. Fortunately, I ran across a citation to this 1968 book—which predates the Vygotsky boom as well as much of Leontiev's and Luria's English translations. It's a fascinating time capsule and helped me to get a broader understanding of Rubinshtein's context and influence.

Vygotsky (here, "Vygotskij") is mentioned, especially in relation to psychic development (p.47). The mention is brief, but Payne notes that despite Soviet criticism of Vygotsky, "the principle of historical development has remained one of the fundamental principles of Soviet psychology" (p.47). 

Like Vygotsky, Rubinshtein also addressed a crisis in psychology: "a crisis of the philosophic basis of the science," which had fragmented into schools including introspectivism and behaviorism; "the task facing psychology is the re-establishment of a unified object," which "can only be achieved by the transformation of the concepts of behavior on the basis of the Marxian concept of human activity," conceived as "a dialectic of subject and object" (p.50). 

Rubinshtein developed these ideas in:

• Fundamentals of Psychology (1935), which was the basis for 
• Fundamentals of General Psychology (1940; second edition, 1946) (p.51) (Note: Payne is not clear about the timeline on p.51, but clarifies it on p.71)

In 1947, FGP was criticized for borrowing too heavily from bourgeois sources, but it remained a classic in the USSR (p.51).

In 1940, Rubinshtein laid out four principles governing Soviet psychology:

1. "the principle of psycho-physical unity"
2. "the principle of psychic development"
3. "the principle of historicity"
4. "the principle of the unity of theory and practice" (p.52)

"Rubinstejn sees these four principles as the expression of the one basic principle of Soviet psychology, i.e., the principle of the unity of consciousness and behavior" (p.52).

Rubinshtein saw the crisis in psychology as "the equation of the psychic with the phenomena of consciousness" (p.79), and his resolution was to understand consciousness as interconnected with the material world—reconstructing psychology on the philosophical foundation of Marxism-Leninism (p.82). In this understanding, activity is the dialectic between subject and object (p.84). When the human psyche emerged, we entered a qualitatively new stage of the evolutionary process, "brought about by the changing conditions of the organism which demanded a new form of activity—work activity—which in its turn demanded a new corresponding form of psychic regulation" (p.89). Interestingly, Rubinshtein went directly to the same source that had been cited by Vygotsky & Luria and that would later be cited by Leontiev: Engels' story in the Dialectics of Nature of how humanity emerged through labor (p.90). In this story, the division of labor emerges because "man's activity is no longer directed to the immediate satisfaction of his own personal needs but to the satisfaction of those of the community" (p.91). Among the implications: human activity is the material object of psychology (p.125). So, for Rubinshtein, psychology is the generalized science of human activity (p.125). 

Let's pause here to note a couple of things:

• In claiming that psychology is the generalized science of human activity, Rubinshtein opens the door for either making psychology an interdisciplinary science or for reallocating responsibilities from other disciplines to psychology. Keep in mind that during this period, the USSR had banned sociology, so that's one big competitor out of the way. This impulse of uniting all studies of human activity under a single framework is still active in CHAT circles.
• The paragraph above sounds a lot like Leontiev's activity theory. (Recall that Rubinshtein was on Leontiev's dissertation committee in 1940.) But notice that Rubinshtein has not discussed a few key things that we associate with activity theory. One is tool mediation, which Leontiev appears to have retained from his time in the Vygotsky-Luria Circle. The other is levels of activity; I'm not clear on whether these were Leontiev's own invention or whether he synthesized them from another contributor.

Overall, this was a fascinating book. The first two sections overview psychology's development in the USSR and will be interesting to anyone who is concerned with this period. The remaining two sections deal more specifically with Rubinshtein. If you're interested in either of these, definitely pick this book up. 

Reading :: Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray?

Methodological Thinking in Psychology: 60 Years Gone Astray?
Edited by Aaro Toomela and Jaan Valsiner

This edited collection results from a challenge the editors posed to the contributors: Has psychology gone astray over the past 60 years? (For a frame of reference, this book was published in 2010, so the "60 years" = 1950 to 2010.) In the preface, the editors argue that after World War II, North American psychology became mainstream globally, displacing the German-Austrian tradition. They asked the contributors:

1. "Which of the historical or new principles should be introduced to the modern psychology?"
2. "How would mainstream psychology benefit from utilizing the principles you propose to introduce into methodological thinking of modern psychology?" (p.ix)

Readers of this blog might additionally ask, "Why is Clay reading about methodological thinking in psychology?" And the answer, predictably, is in the collection's connection to Vygotskian theory and activity theory. Valsiner has written quite a bit on the history of both, while Toomela has written several articles exploring elements of Vygotskian theory and lambasting activity theory. This collection has a few pieces that get into the history and theory, so I decided to pick it up. Because of my narrow interest, I'll only touch on a couple.

One is Nikolai Veresov's "Forgotten Methodology: Vygotsky's Case" (pp.267-295), in which Veresov notes a 1978 declaration that psychology was in crisis (p.267). "Yet it is very comfortable crisis," he adds: "experimental psychologists feel free from mind-crashing puzzles of how to interpret theoretically the data they obtain; as for psychological theoreticians—they are free to mix various concepts and principles in order to create 'the theory' they like to create, as if they are building a house out of Lego blocks" (p.268). Veresov argues that instead, psychology should consider "Vygotsky's case," in which he addressed his own time's crisis in psychology. Veresov highlights these aspects of Vygotsky's theory:

1. "Claim against empiricism and descriptive methods" (p.269). Veresov argues that "For Vygotsky, the descriptive explanatory models and principles based on empirical methods of investigation should be replaced by explanatory models and principles" (p.270).
2. "Claim of developmental analysis and qualitative research methods" (p.270). Veresov argues that "Instead of merely describing the stages of development, psychological theory should find the ways of how to explain development (including its sources, laws, conditions, moving forces, contradictions, and underlying mechanisms)" (p.270).

Veresov goes on to propose that Vygotsky's genetic method should be considered a two-step process in which a "dramatical collision" leads to "tool (sign) creation," leading to "use of sign" (p.277). He then bemoans the fact that the West mainly encounter Vygotsky through Mind in Society, in which "non-classical Vygotsky was adapted and incorporated into classical traditional psychological theoretical stream. The price for this was its methodological simplification and theoretical fragmentation" (p.279). He gives these examples:

1. "First example: General genetic law as a victim of simplification" (p.280). He argues that Mind in Society oversimplified Vygotsky's genetic law, and specifically removed the concept of dramatical collision. He specifically calls out Engestromian CHAT for providing "no place at all for dramatical collision" (p.282). 
2. "Second example: Zone of proximal development as a victim of fragmentation" (p.282). He argues that ZPD has become the "visit card" [calling card] of Vygotsky—but ZPD is not a central part of the theory (p.282).

Another chapter is Holbrook Mahn's "Vygotsky's Methodological Approach: A Blueprint for the Future of Psychology" (p.297). Here, Mahn focuses on Vygotsky's manuscript on the crisis in psychology. Again, Mahn derides how Mind in Society presented Vygotsky's works. He focuses on Vygotsky's method, including analysis into units, word meaning as a unit of analysis (better translated as "meaning through language use" or "meaning through the sign operation"; p.315), and the relationship between tools and signs (p.318). 

In all, I thought parts of this book were relevant to my project of understanding CHAT. But the book is a giant "I told you so" in which the authors hold the faith, waiting for the rest of the world to return to the German-Austrian tradition of psychology, while hectoring those who have followed different methodological traditions. I doubt these jeremiads will change the minds of psychologists, who may well feel that their own methodological and theoretical traditions have been given short shrift. But if you're interested in how Vygotskians understand Vygotsky's methodological approach, Veresov's and Mahn's chapters may be of interest.

Reading :: The Mentality of Apes

The Mentality of Apes
By Wolfgang Köhler

Vygotsky and Luria cite this 1924 book repeatedly in their 1930 book Studies on the History of Behavior. I can see why. Köhler, a Gestaltist, conducted several studies on chimpanzee problem-solving, providing them with tools such as sticks to see whether they could figure out how to get fruit from various locations. In the process, he identified some of the limits to chimpanzee problem-solving, specifically a difficulty in using tools that are not in their visual field at the same time as their objective.

The studies themselves are fascinating, but Köhler is also an entertaining writer. He evidently developed a great deal of affection for the chimpanzees, who he introduces to us by name and temperament, and he provides not just results but also entertaining and illuminating stories about how their temperaments interacted with their problem-solving skills. In one example, a chimp was trying to get a piece of fruit that had been suspended high over his head. Rather than stacking some boxes to stand on top of them, he tried to convince Köhler to stand under the fruit so he could stand on Köhler's shoulders. Failing that, he led other chimps under the fruit and tried to stand on them. Soon the others caught on and chimps competed to stand on each other—thus failing to retrieve the fruit.

Maybe I'm wired differently, but I found this to be an immensely entertaining read. Take a look!

Reading :: Knowledge, Organization, and Management

Knowledge, Organization, and Management: Building on the Work of Max Boisot
Edited by John Child and Martin Ihrig

I've reviewed Boisot's books elsewhere on this blog. This edited collection was put together shortly after Boisot's death, containing both Boisot's work and additional work by his collaborators, situated by his framework. Four of the chapters have been published elsewhere: three in prominent journals, one in a book chapter. 

The book is in seven sections:

1. Setting the stage
2. Analyses of the Chinese system
3. Organizational complexity
4. The strategic management of knowledge
5. Knowledge in big science
6. Innovations in education
7. Concluding reflections

and they highlight Boisot's contributions across these different spaces. These contributions include his depiction of I-Space (a cube with the axes of abstraction, codification, diffusion) and resulting implications for complexity, culture, learning, and organization. I-Space is built on Claude Shannon's theory of information, and I view it to be a weak foundation for understanding how people actually circulate and use information, but it is the alpha and omega of his theorizing throughout.

With that introduction, let's get to the chapters.

In "Max Boisot and the Dynamic Evolution of Knowledge" (pp.3-16), Martin Ihrig and John Child say that "while Peter Drucker in the 1960s first drew attention to the fact that increasingly we are living in knowledge societies, Boisot provided a conceptual framework that enables us to appreciate the significance of that trend. His framework offers an understanding of how the ways we choose to express, communicate, and share knowledge are intrinsic to how we relate to one another in organizations and societies" (p.3). The framework started with Boisot's doctoral thesis in 1987, in which he described the codification-diffusion framework known as C-Space (p.3); later he added the third dimension of abstraction to yield I-Space (p.4). The authors describe I-Space this way:

The I-Space is a conceptual framework that facilitates the study of knowledge flows in diverse populations of "agents"—individuals, groups, firms, industries, alliances, governments, and nations. As one of Boisot's most fundamental innovations, it enabled him, and the many other researchers he inspired, to study and advance understanding of the emerging knowledge-based society and the implications of the information revolution. (p.4)

 As an architect, the authors say, Boisot thought in terms of spaces (p.7). He applied his insights to other areas in concert with collaborators:

Once Boisot had identified an opportunity for an interesting project, he would try to bring people and organizations together, set up a framework, and then start to research and develop. Typically his collaborators were less well read and less theoretically versed than he was. On the other hand they often brought specialized empirical knowledge and a questioning perspective to the process, which helped to put Boisot's abstractions to the test of validity. (p.10)

In "From Fiefs to Clans and Network Capitalism: Explaining China's Emerging Economic Order" (pp.19-48), Boisot and Child use the C-Space (a four-field with axes of codification and diffusion; p.22) to conceptualize four types of transactional environments: bureaucracies, fiefs, markets, and clans. Boisot defines codification as "the selection and compression of data into stable structures" (p.21, citing Claude Shannon), and argues that "the codification and diffusion of information create a transactional environment that conditions the institutional possibilities to be found in different regions of the C-Space and endows them with some quite specific features" (p.21). For instance, when information is codified but undiffused, you tend to get bureaucracies, in which the diffusion of information is centrally controlled and relationships are impersonal; when information is both codified and diffused, you get markets, in which the diffusion of information is virtually unlimited and relationships are again impersonal (p.22). Obviously, this four-field diagram gives us ideal types and various configurations might exist. Critically, this is a conceptual framework, not an empirical one, so Boisot and Child do not give us guidance on where the boundaries are: at what point can we say that information is codified rather than uncodified? Diffused rather than undiffused? Those of us who conduct case studies can imagine a lot of situations in which the same text behaves differently depending on the frame and the other texts at play—but those issues are unexplored here.

We are, however, told that 

abstraction is a prerequisite for the creation of robust codifications and the construction of a rational-legal order. If codification seeks to economize on data processing by assigning the data or experience to categories, abstraction seeks to economize on the number of categories used in the act of codifying. (p.25)

In "Analyses of the Chinese System" (pp.49-58), Child reflects that Boisot developed C-Space into I-Space in order to make sense of China's economic reform and the business systems emerging from it. Boisot based C-Space in part on a 1952 publication by Kroeber & Kluckhorn, in which they conclude that culture "described the ways that people structure and share information" (p.50). The 2x2 of C-Space naturally results in "four transactional or organizational modes" (p.50): one for each resulting quadrant. Later in this chapter, Child notes that Boisot collaborated with Guo Liang Xing, who closely observed "the activities of six enterprise directors, each for a period of six weeks in 1987" (p.56)—I'm not clear on the methodology, but this sounds like an empirical study I'll have to follow up on. 

Child adds that Boisot's reliance on his root paradigm did pose some limitations. One was that 

Max generally treated information as a cultural phenomenon, regarding the way it was articulated and shaped reflecting cultural norms. He called his original framework the "culture" space. When he depicted institutional or organizational arrangements in terms of different configurations of informational dimensions, he was implicitly regarding them as cultural constructions. This tended to overlook another factor that influences the shaping of institutions and organizations, namely power. (p.57)

Child goes on to allege that Boisot recognized this issue, but "put the issue to one side because it would unduly detract from the elegance of his framework. Yet three of the quadrants of the C-Space are structures of asymmetric power" (p.57; the exception is markets). Child notes that whereas Boisot overlooked power, the Chinese Communist Party did not, and the CCP's consolidation of power explains why China is not moving toward a market configuration (p.58)!

In "Extreme outcomes, connectivity, and power laws: Toward an econophysics of organization" (pp.61-92), Boisot and Bill McKelvey argue that organizational science is built to be nomothetic (i.e., to expect predictability via regularities), but this approach has let us down. After some discussion that I will skip over for lack of interest, they map three ontological regimes (ordered, complex, chaotic) onto the axes of Variety of Stimuli and Variety of Responses, forming "Ashby Space" (p.76). These are associated with strategies: routinizing, adaptive, and "headless chicken," respectively (p.78). 

In "The creation and shaping of knowledge" (pp.109-128), Boisot argues that knowledge management is old in science, new in management (p.110). (Side note: Here and elsewhere, Boisot tends to portray science as ahead of the rest of the culture. This might be why he was so interested in collaborating with CERN.) He asks: why have we been so slow to knowledge management? And he argues that it's because

1. knowledge isn't observable or measurable
2. information and communication technologies have "led to the 'dematerialization' of economic activity -- the substitution of data and information for physical resources" in many areas
3. "one cannot manage a knowledge resource as if it were a physical resource" (p.111)

He outlines three problems:

1. What is being managed?
2. Is knowledge a social phenomenon?
3. How does knowledge relate to power? (p.112)

Although he says he doesn't have the space to deal with these problems in detail, he proffers the I-space as a conceptual framework to help address them (p.113). 

What is knowledge, and how does it differ from data and information? Boisot asserts that "data can be viewed as a discernible difference between different energy states" and draws on Bateson to define information as the data that make a difference to someone, i.e., data that "will modify an agent's expectations and dispositions to act in particular ways," i.e., its "knowledge base" (p.113). For that agent to be knowledgeable, "its internal dispositions to act can be modified upon receipt of data that has some information value"—and here, inexplicably, he cites Latour and Woolgar (1979) (p.113).

Just a side note: it seems jolting to me that Boisot would ground his theory of information in Claude Shannon's work, then cite Bateson and Latour, whose understanding of information seems to be radically different. But such is the danger of an eclectic mind.

Thus, Boisot argues, knowledge doesn't flow; data does (p.114). Thus when he discusses "knowledge sharing," he "will actually be referring to some degree of resonance being achieved between the knowledge states of two or more agents following some sharing of data among them" (p.114). Knowledge is not dispositional and thus it doesn't have solid contours: perhaps two agents' understandings will loosely "resonate," but they will not be identical (p.114). "People are concerned with saving time and resources required to articulate and transmit knowledge. They are thus more likely to share knowledge that is clear and umambiguous than knowledge of a more tacit and elusive nature" —he gives the example of sharing stock market figures by fax as opposed to describing a Pollack painting over the phone (p.114). And "the articulation of knowledge, in effect, calls for two kinds of cognitive efforts: abstraction and codification" (p.114): 

• "Abtraction either invokes or creates the minimum number of cognitive categories through which an agent makes sense of events": the fewer the number of categories, the more abstract its "apprehension of events" is (p.114). 
• "Codification, by contrast, refines the categories that the agent invokes or creates so that it can use them efficiently and in discriminating ways. The fewer data an agent has to process to distinguish between categories, the more codified the categories that it has to draw upon" (p.115). 

"Abstraction and codification are mutually reinforcing" and "the agent that is able to economize on its data processing resources through successive acts of codification and abstraction will be able to transact with other agents more economically and hence more extensively than will the agent that cannot" (p.115). Boisot adds that 

A problem arises, however, when much of the knowledge that is of potential value to other agents is of a more tacit nature and hence not readily available to trading. Much of an organization's technological know-how, for example, may be of this kind. It is the fruit of a slow accumulation of idiosyncratic experience, and it resides in the heads or the behaviors of employees, working singly or in groups. (p.115)

Here and elsewhere, Boisot often refers to knowledge as residing in heads—which, honestly, makes his earlier reference to Latour even more baffling. On the next page, he says: "From an intellectual capital perspective, knowledge management is about the capture, storage, and retrieval of knowledge located either in the heads of employees, in the heads of outside collaborators, or in documents" (p.116). He concedes that 

by their very nature, abstraction and codification are highly selective processes. Only a small part of a tacit knowledge base can ever be subject to articulation and structuring if genuine data processing economies are to be achieved. Thus, much tacit knowledge inevitably stays with its possessors whatever efforts at codifying and abstracting it have been subjected to—and much of this tacit knowledge will be valuable. (p.117)

 Next, he gets to the question of "social learning," which "occurs when changes in the stocks of knowledge held by one or more agents in a given population trigger coordinate changes in the stocks of knowledge that are held by other agents in the population" (p.118). He briefly cites Piaget and Weick (p.122), then describes the social learning cycle as following an S-curve in I-space (p.123). The six steps are:

• scanning
• problem solving
• abstraction
• diffusion
• absorption
• impacting (p.124). 

In their commentary on this piece, "The strategic management of knowledge" (pp.129-139), Martin Ihrig and Ian MacMillan note that after 2006, Boisot "focused on two areas: mapping critical knowledge assets, cultural and organizational structures, and associated learning paths; and simulating strategic knowledge management processes, in particular knowledge flows derived from knowledge-based agent interactions" (p.130). Mapping in I-Space "allows us to represent an agent's knowledge as a portfolio of knowledge assets, as a network of nodes and their links to other nodes" (p.136). Mapping these nodes  in a network allows us "to consider its dynamic behavior" (p.136). 

Skipping ahead, in "Knowledge in big science" (pp.155-166), Agusti Canals asserts something that I found key to understanding Boisot's theorizing: Boisot claimed that he had an "inability" to deal with mathematics (pp.155-156), and this inability kept him from a career in the natural sciences. So—and this is my commentary—Boisot repeatedly frames science as a vanguard for the rest of us to follow, and he prefers to model interactions in terms that resemble those of physics.

In "The three phases of Max Boisot's theorizing" (pp.205-211), John-Christopher Spender characterizes I-Space as suggesting "a complex economics of information, an information-based approach to political economy" (p.206). Spender notes that Boisot characterized information in energy terms (there's the physics influence again) and because I-Space was "self-contained" in energy terms, 

the flow around the Social Learning Cycle ... 'worked' because the unit of information flowing could not be at all places in the cycle at the same time—it is trading-off the contrasting energy natures and values of the different types of information itemized in the Keio paper. There was a corresponding change in entropy as information moved around the cycle because in the real world, as opposed to the abstractions of neoclassical or "Newtonian economics," generating, transforming, codifying and deploying information is entropy-raising work. (p.206)

My commentary: This passage was tremendously illuminating to me because it emphasizes how Boisot's guiding metaphor of Newtonian physics (economics?) captured his theorizing and resulted in what seem to me to be very odd claims. Boisot uses I-Space to track transformations in information: how is "a unit of information" abstracted, diffused, etc.? But consider a study that Boisot briefly cited earlier, Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life. In that study, Latour describes cascades of rerepresentations, in which (for instance) the result of cutting off a rat's toes is represented in a column of numbers, then in a graph, then in other representations leading up to published papers and finally assertions that can be made in textbooks. Yet such representations are not just transformations in a single stream, they are yielded by combining previous representations, and they are themselves combined and compared to yield insights. They also don't disappear—scientists at the Pasteur Lab and elsewhere keep these representations so that they can unwind their arguments at any point, producing evidence at each point in the chain. In actual studies conducted by an ethnographer of science, we don't see a serial set of transformations but a tangled web, and information must continue to exist in different parts of the cycle at the same time. It is not the unit of information (whatever it might be—Boisot is vague about what constitutes information in the SLC) but the relations among different representations that makes science, and arguably other endeavors using complex information, work. 

Let's leave it there. As always, I find Boisot's work to be fascinating but heterodox, and I look forward to continuing to think through its wrinkles. If the question of information interests you as well, definitely take a look.