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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Handbook of Sociocultural Psychology
  • Cited by 77
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2007
Online ISBN:
9780511611162
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511611162
Subjects:
Life Sciences, Cultural Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Psychology, Psychology: General Interest
Series:
Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology
Collection:
Cambridge Handbooks of Psychology
Information

Book description

This book, first published in 2007, is an international overview of the state of our knowledge in sociocultural psychology - as a discipline located at the crossroads between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Since the 1980s, the field of psychology has encountered the growth of a new discipline - cultural psychology - that has built new connections between psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and semiotics. The handbook integrates contributions of sociocultural specialists from fifteen countries, all tied together by the unifying focus on the role of sign systems in human relations with the environment. It emphasizes theoretical and methodological discussions on the cultural nature of human psychological phenomena, moving on to show how meaning is a natural feature of action and how it eventually produces conventional symbols for communication. Such symbols shape individual experiences and create the conditions for consciousness and the self to emerge; turn social norms into ethics; and set history into motion.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • Chapter 19 - “Myself, the Project”
    pp 404-420
  • Sociocultural Interpretations of Young Adulthood
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Psychology seemed to be condemned to be always searching for an object. This chapter devotes to the presentation of a résumé of Peirce's semiotic logic. The psychological status of the interpretant is dependent of the semiosis to which it belongs. The experience examined in the chapter is an enactive experience, it is the experience that presents the world, it is the experience that results from alive movement that produces the development of an agent and its change into actor. At the same time that the environment becomes intelligible, changes into a meaningful Umwelt where the organism learns what to do, so that its behavior follows a rationale. It is the kind of experience that exist before communication and language comes to the scenery. The chapter dwells on how movement turns in action, and the latter into actuations, so that meaningful objects, situations and the lived Umwelt can appear.
  • Chapter 20 - Apprenticeship in Conversation and Culture
    pp 423-443
  • Emerging Sociability in Preschool Peer Talk
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter proposes a new way to approach the ontogenesis of symbol formation: the analysis of movement and its relation to the development of action. First, it highlights some of the essential traits of movement, both during the early adult-child dyad as well as in temporal arts. The chapter discusses the capacity that movement has to express vital affections and modes of temporal organization of movements: alternation, synchrony, and the repetition-variation form. It then suggests that the variations in the quality of movement, the attunements, and the repetition-variation forms that constitute the social circular reactions are elaborations, in the Dissanayake sense, which have the virtue to drive an ongoing flow of the vitality affects. Finally, the chapter proposes that the elaborations that compose the social circular reactions undergo a gradual externalization process beyond the dyad.
  • Chapter 21 - The Creation of New Cultures in Peer Interaction
    pp 444-459
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Language acquisition is seen as having a plurality of functions that are themselves linked to a plurality of contexts beyond language without which its uses could not be understood. This chapter explains how the pragmatic perspective was introduced in early Cognitive development through the acquisition of language. In the study of early infancy, it is very common for objects to be treated as natural signs that lead to "natural and direct interpretations. The chapter discusses the Bruner's work in the 1970s, influenced by the philosophers of the linguistic turn. He introduced the idea of "pragmatic opportunism" which humans use when solving problems. Based on the work on triadic adult-infant-object interaction, the chapter highlights the importance of longitudinal, microgenetic and qualitative research, based on the processes of construction. The Peircien approach, which allows for the inclusion of objects and their uses within a semiotic reading, is also discussed.
  • Chapter 22 - “Culture Has No Internal Territory”
    pp 460-483
  • Culture as Dialogue
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter introduces the Network of Meanings, a theoretical methodological perspective, which is being constructed for the investigation and understanding of the complex processes of human development. Initially, the Network of Meanings perspective was elaborated for the study of the insertion of babies into day care. This perspective proposes development as occurring throughout life span, as time irreversible co-constructions of active persons, in the course of the multiple interactions and relations established, within culturally and socially organized environments. The interactive processes established among persons within specific contexts are considered as embedded in and traversed by a socio-historical matrix, which is conceived as being composed by social, economical, historical, political, and cultural elements. Multiple developmental trajectories are possible to be conceived based on the adopted assumptions, especially on the notion of constraint, which at each moment and situation sets some limits and possibilities for the person's development.
  • Chapter 24 - Money as a Cultural Tool Mediating Personal Relationships
    pp 508-523
  • Child Development of Exchange and Possession
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter disentangles experience, beliefs, consciousness, and the real by producing a narrative essay about the natural history of their evolution. It examines how communication in hierarchically organized groups offers the possibility for the production of conventional symbols, and so opens the path for humanization. The chapter then explores how conventional symbols come to appear, so that a subjective representation of situations can be taken to be real. The chapter describes the examination of how beliefs develop from dramatic actuations within a social Umwelt. Actuations are a product of the combination of actions that have a semiotic structure, and so produce understanding. The teleonomic character of action-semiosis, actuations and scripts for performing, makes the actor to accumulate resources (scripts) to face new situations. The chapter shows that reality makes itself apparent in consciousness through experiences, and these are as much a result of these encounters as to how psyche works.
  • Chapter 25 - The Family
    pp 524-540
  • Negotiating Cultural Values
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter reviews psychological studies of emotion in the broad area of cultural psychology. It presents an analysis of indigenous emotional state prevalent among Koreans as an exemplar of illustrating cultural psychological analysis of emotion. The chapter discusses the indigenous analysis in broader context and the implications it has for psychological research in general. The research tradition that followed the universalist paradigm tried to describe commonalities and differences in emotional experience among different cultures. Psychologists in the field of cultural psychology all seem to agree on this constitutive view of culture and emotion. In order to clarify the cultural emotion of shimcheong, the chapter examines several concepts having similar features to it from existing literature. More important task for cultural psychology of emotion is to show how emotion is lived through for individual members to manage their individuality as well as collectivity.
  • Chapter 26 - Culture and Social Representations
    pp 543-559
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A person using a symbolic resource is a person using a novel, a film, a picture, a song, or a ritual, to address an unfamiliar situation in her everyday life. This chapter sketches the historical background of the notion of symbolic resource, and highlights its potential for socio-cultural psychology. It gives a model for the analysis of uses of symbolic resources. The chapter shows how symbolic resources participate to psychological development because of their mediation of three basic psychological processes: intentionality, inscription in time, and distancing. It explains that the symbolic systems and artefacts have as major property the fact that they encapsulate human meaning and experience; people are constantly striving for meaning, especially in moments of change. However, it appears that social sciences are still unable to account for how cultural tools participate in people's personal meaning making, and emotional elaboration as part of psychic transformation.
  • Chapter 27 - The Institutions Inside
    pp 560-575
  • Self, Morality, and Culture
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the parallels between metaphor and the sign applying to the extent that one accepts the temporal embeddedness of human meaning-making. By temporal embeddedness, it is meant that each experience humans have is made novel by its unique position within the temporal order. One situation in which the literal and imagined are allowed close company, and remain visible as they hold it, is the poem. The chapter turns to illustrate the poetic motion of the sign in more detail. Daniel describes feeling that his identity was a façade, a remainder left behind after years of draining emotional content out of experience. The 'literal' and 'imagined' can be seen as a dynamic field of analysis in socio-cultural psychology. In an ephemeral world, humans are doing something to organize experience, yet that organizer, the sign, itself bears the mark of the temporal flow, and perpetually transforming through those tensions.
  • Chapter 28 - Identity, Rights, and Duties
    pp 576-590
  • The Illustrative Case of Positioning by Iran, the United States, and the European Union
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter highlights what cultural-genetic psychology considers to be two pillars of orientation of human species: orientation to objects and orientation to social others, described by Wallon and Vygotsky in their respective socio-genetic approaches. It discusses the role of voice and speech in religious directivity and their essential implication in prayer. The analysis of spoken and written protocols emerges as a strategic method, for the study of both directivity in general and that of religious activity in particular. The consideration of external representational phenomena as linked to the processing of internal mental representations opens a door to the external analysis of mental processes from the cognitive perspective. A psychotechnical resource can provide us with extremely rich information on the external and internal mechanisms of mediation. From a mediational perspective, considering humankind as a family indeed appears to be a good psychotecnics of thinking and of feeling.
  • Chapter 29 - Symbolic Politics and Cultural Symbols
    pp 591-607
  • Identity Formation Between and Beyond Nations and States
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A back-and-forth shuffling of initiating and responding actions contributes to the transformation of both personal and social experiences. To illustrate these dialectic processes of change, this chapter draws on young adults' experiences of late modern social life. The experience of teaching young adults has been for us a rich source of examples of the construction of Do-it-Yourself (DIY) personal life projects that Beck and Beck-Gernsheim see as the personal response to the demands of life in late modernity. The processes of creating an identity and a personal place in social institutions: the processes of "Individualization" are critical experiences of the transition to adult privileges and responsibilities. A personal identity and pattern of interaction is progressively constructed and affirmed in its expression in multiple person-by-institution encounters. The chapter focuses on how reciprocal activities link the sociological theory to sociocultural psychological theory.
  • Chapter 31 - Social and Cognitive Determinants of Collective Memory for Public Events1
    pp 625-644
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores young children's conversations as a unique linguistic, social, and cultural phenomenon, by investigating the relative salience, contexts, affordances, structures, and functions of conversation in preschoolers' peer interactions. It reviews the developmental perspective of child-language study and socio-cultural perspective of sociolinguistics and ethnography. The chapter then draws on both in analyzing naturally occurring peer conversations of young Israeli children. The socio-cultural perspective on children's conversations brings to the fore the culturally filtered nature of conversational skills, emphasizing that the specific definition of the scope of normative conversational performance is culture-sensitive and often reflects or echoes underlying cultural norms and ethos. The chapter focuses on initiation and engagement patterns and on the linguistic and topical characteristics of each segment of the interactions to demonstrate the ways preschoolers gradually move from activity-related talk to independent conversations. Then, it discusses the rare cases of non-activity-related talk in preschool peer interaction.
  • Chapter 32 - Collective Memory
    pp 645-660
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter defines peer culture as a stable set of activities or routines, artifacts, values, and concerns that children produce and share in interaction with peers. It discusses on sociocultural theory that can benefit from theory and research in childhood studies and the notion of interpretive reproduction. To demonstrate processes of children creating peer cultures and establishing group identities the chapter considers the involvement of children of various ages in three different types of shared peer activities: ritualized sharing, improvised fantasy play, and shared acts of resistance to adult authority. The chapter considers the nature and development of affiliation or friendship in these and other shared features of children's peer cultures. It describes the three of many features of children's creation of new cultures in peer interaction: toddlers' non-verbal and verbal play routines, children's improvised fantasy play, and children strategies and secondary adjustments to challenge and get around adult rules.
  • Chapter 33 - Issues in the Socio-Cultural Study of Memory
    pp 661-677
  • Making Memory Matter
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the problems with essentialist approaches to culture and explores an alternative, dialogic, approach to the problem of "cultural mismatch". There are at least two different types of approaches to the notion of "culture" that are used in educational research and practices. The chapter argues that the essentialist type of approaches to culture, although useful at times, can lead to unilateral pedagogies while the dialogic approach to culture promotes collaboration and dialogue among the teacher and the students. The proponents of adult-run unilateralism argue that the students from non-mainstream and often economically and politically disadvantaged communities need to learn how to successfully navigate and operate in mainstream institutions that White middle-class teachers represent. The chapter describes that successful teachers often develop creole communities in their classrooms in response to perceived interactional and communicational breakdowns instead of using an essentialist perspective of pre-existing cultures.
  • Chapter 34 - The Social Basis of Self-Reflection
    pp 678-691
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter summarizes theory and research descended from Vygotsky and his followers that takes seriously the idea that practice is essential for testing and improving "cultural-historical activity theory" (CH/AT). It reviews some theoretical principles used in CH/AT-inspired intervention research. As applied to the domain of mathematics, the Elkonin-Davydov curriculum is designed to provide students with the clearest possible understanding of the concept of real number. Davydov's work was initially a key inspiration for the Finnish group of activity theorists who have expanded the use of the theory to the world of work. The work led to an intervention toolkit based on the principle of double stimulation. The chapter also discusses the 5th Dimension idiocultures, which routinely create an institutionalized version of a zone of proximal development for participants. Like the Change Laboratories, those who would use the 5th Dimension to challenge CH/AT theories turn to "real life" measures of effectiveness.
  • General Conclusions: Socio-Cultural Psychology on the Move
    pp 692-708
  • Semiotic methodology in the making
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the relationship between children and money in developmental psychology researches. It summarizes the four maxims of developmental psychology for money. First, it is not predicated on the homo economics as rational economic decision-makers. Second, in analyzing children's understanding and knowledge of money, such understanding and knowledge should be always discussed in association with children's life-world, instead of separating from it. Third, it is not predicated on a neutral money goods exchange system in market economy, but should be analyzed in the social context with its own cultures and histories. Fourth, developmental psychology for money inquires how children would appropriate money as a cultural tool and change their participation in their societies through the appropriation. The chapter explores how they would form new culture through implementation of such activities, instead of inquiring how children would understand money as a neutral tool which functions in a market economy system.

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