Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series foreword
- Preface
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I History and culture
- Part II Doing psychology
- Part IV Activity in work and school
- 13 The qualitative analysis of the development of a child's theoretical knowledge and thinking
- 14 Innovative organizational learning in medical and legal settings
- 15 Intellectual and manual labor: Implications for developmental theory
- 16 Visionary realism, lifespan discretionary time, and the evolving role of work
- Index
15 - Intellectual and manual labor: Implications for developmental theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series foreword
- Preface
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- Part I History and culture
- Part II Doing psychology
- Part IV Activity in work and school
- 13 The qualitative analysis of the development of a child's theoretical knowledge and thinking
- 14 Innovative organizational learning in medical and legal settings
- 15 Intellectual and manual labor: Implications for developmental theory
- 16 Visionary realism, lifespan discretionary time, and the evolving role of work
- Index
Summary
Tensions of developmental theory: Need for a critical perspective
Developmental theories operate with two principles in tension with one another. On the one hand, developmental analysis must meet ordinary tests of analytic adequacy by providing an account of the organization of behavior as it is manifested in a particular setting, related to the demands and structure of that setting. This mode of analysis involves the construction of linkages between behaviors and/or thoughts “here and now” with conditions “here and now” – from which descriptions of the organization of behavior, here and now, are derived.
But developmentalists try to do more. The essential move in developmental analysis is to compare behavioral organization at one time with behavioral organization at some other time. These analytic “moments” (Glick 1992) are then linked into a series. The linked moments are treated as defining a trajectory, which can then be taken to be informative about development and the differences between the less developed and the more developed. However, in order to do this, in many instances, the “here and now” conditions must be changed so as to allow for situations to be used or observed which are appropriate to different age groups. When this has been done, the construction of a developmental description involves a balancing of the evidentiary requirements for understanding behavior here and now with the comparative requirement for making statements about the relationships among behaviors which differ in their here and now conditions.
The tension in trying these enterprises together is that they embody, in fact, different principles of analysis.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Sociocultural PsychologyTheory and Practice of Doing and Knowing, pp. 357 - 382Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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