Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Bazerman, "Discursively Structured Activities"

Bazerman, Charles. "Discursively Structured Activities." Mind, Culture, and Activity 4.4 (1997): 296-308.

Bazerman is concerned with accounting descriptively for the roles of discourse in structuring systemic activity. He notes that discourse is a fundament to social structure; it provides a "regularizing force." As such, Bazerman folds together Vygotskyan principles of situated cognition with Activity Theory in an effort to reframe more common approaches to structuring in the social sciences. Interest in structuring applies here both to the cause of regularities in the technosciences and to "the discursive organization of fields of knowledge production [i.e., disciplinary formations]" (10).

Because the existing model of the case study tends to deal very little with tradition and because ANT (in Bazerman's reading of it, at least) tends to focus too much on the individual agent, we need better descriptive tools to account for the structuring of social systems. For this, Bazerman proposes the language of genre (as it in turn is used to articulated expectations). While "dismantling dominations," Bazerman concludes, we are put upon to come "up with some order we can tolerate and perhaps trust" (12).

Terms: "verbal coordination" (1), "regularizing force" (3), "actant-network theory" (6), "descriptive tools" (7), "conscious categorization" (7), "systems of genre" (9), "agenda-setting documents" (10),

"Because the produced discursive objects are in a sense concrete, although symbolic--an actual utterance, a physical book, an interactive computer program that can be run repeatedly on a computer--they provide a concrete locus for the enactment of social structure" (1-2).

"The fact that written and archived material (whether in print or on an electronic server) can travel to different groupings of people, over geographic distances, and over time, means that their structuring influence may be widespread and persistent" (2). Rel. this to the structuring force of the writing prompt?

"To clarify, the problem is one of describing the organization, structure, or order that exists within those activities identified as scientific and technological, the processes by which that order is created and maintained, the forces which influence the shape of that order, and the consequences of that order for the activity carried our within it" (4).

"Studies of localities tend to lose sight of the historical processes by which individuals and groups attempt to provide continuities among locales, attempt to draw together moments across time and space (as through organizations, training, institutions, forums, communication)" (5).

"Unlike earlier theories of scientific and technological structure actant network theory foregrounds individual agency, foregrounds an historical account of current arrangements, and foregrounds the creative response of individuals to complexity and contingency in order to create novel arrangements" (6). Bazerman suggests that ANT (is this the same ANT Latour writes about in Reassembling?) centers on the individual actor.

"What I am suggesting is little more than providing a structurationist balance to our accounts of the social construction of technoscience, but the problem remains of what terms to use to describe the persistent, though changing, social landscape which we must come to terms with and act within, if we are to act effectively" (7).

"That is, by looking at the symbolic tools of a discipline we can see what it is the tools can do, while keeping in mind that individuals always find new uses for tools" (10).

"Socialization can be seen as a series of concrete tool/concept/artifact/mediation integrations into personal relations organized within activities" (11).

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