Showing papers by "Jaan Valsiner published in 2003"

Beyond Social Representations: A Theory of Enablement

Abstract: Social representations are simultaneously representations (of what already has come into being, and is recognizable on the basis of previous experience) and representations (of the expected—yet indeterminate—future experience). If viewed from this perspective, social representations are meaning complexes that play the role of macro-level cultural constraints of human conduct in its PRESENT - FUTURE transition. These constraints lead to the generation of micro-level constraints that guide particular thought, feeling, and acting processes. I propose a theory of enablement that treats all cultural tools—signs and instruments—as vehicles of coping with the uncertainty of the immediate future. Signification in the present is meant for the making of the future, rather than taking stock of the present (and past). Human beings create semiotic mediators that set the range and direction for further expectation of to-be-lived-through experience. The resulting meaningfully bounded indeterminacy allows the person to transcend the here-and-now setting through intra-psychological distancing.

Making Personal Sense An Account of Basic Internalization and Externalization Processes

Abstract: This paper presents an account of basic internalization/externalization processes as the vehicle by which socio-cultural meanings are turned into personal sense systems. Such systems guide persons’ actions in respect to their environments. Social and personal worlds constantly mutually constrain each other in ways that lead to transformations in both. Internalization and reciprocal externalization occur as the person takes in and transforms social messages and other signs in self-talk (dialogues with oneself and imagined others). The theoretical account is accompanied by the specifications of empirical criteria for observing personal dialogues, and an empirical example is provided and analyzed in terms of the unfolding of the personal sense system in a task environment. The data of dialogues between police officers and a computer program about adolescent shoplifting reveal how these respondents transformed the computer input through their internalizing/externalizing operations, by interpolating specialize...

Culture and its Transfer: Ways of Creating General Knowledge Through the Study of Cultural Particulars

Abstract: Two perspectives of scientific inquiry-both making use of the notion of culture-are analyzed from the perspective of how general knowledge is being constructed by each. It is demonstrated how cross-cultural psychology has made use of traditional psychology's inductive emphasis on comparisons of samples (and generalization to populations). Crosscultural psychology has been a part of general and differential psychologies. In contrast, the cultural psychology that has developed in parallel with cross-cultural psychology on the basis of anthropology and developmental psychology has been built upon the notion of systemic causality, and on the basis of developmental assumptions. There is overlap in the practical work of cultural and cross-cultural psychologists-cross-cultural evidence can be used in cultural-psychological theorizing. Both disciplines share the focus on interdisciplinary cooperation, and are haunted by the usual limits on inductive inference that plagues all contemporary social sciences. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This article is available in Online Readings in Psychology and Culture: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/7

Editorial Introduction: Beyond Intersubjectivity

Abstract: Contemporary social sciences suffer from a fragmentation of ideas. This is often related to the dominance of empirical papers—conveniently labeled ‘contributions to the literature’. This creates a new phenomenon in the social organization of the sciences—instead of crucial, key empirical evidence (experimentum crucis), which has been an ideal for the role of empirical validation of researchers’ ideas for a long time, we are faced with a new form of decision making about scientific knowledge. That new form can be called ‘democracy of the literature’ (Valsiner, 2000). Without doubt we prefer to live under democratic rule in our social lives—at least as long as we do not experience the repressive function of the Tocquevillian take on ‘democracy’ being the ‘tyranny of the majority over the minority’. Yet when it comes to deciding about matters of science, ‘democracy of the literature’ may eliminate the very essence of science—that of making new knowledge about our objects of investigation, rather than taking other positions vis-à-vis these phenomena. The centrality of the phenomena is crucial for science— and in psychology this has been gradually slipping away (Cairns, 1986). If a science—such as cultural psychology—wants to be what it declares, researchers need not ‘contribute to the literature’, but rather have to ‘create the literature’. This is best done through careful orchestration of theoretical and empirical efforts. Methodology—contrary to currently accepted views that consider it a ‘toolbox’ of ready-to-use