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This chapter examines Vygotsky's method of double stimulation as a basis for formative interventions in the workplace. I argue that double stimulation is radically different from such intervention approaches as the design experiments currently discussed in educational research. Double stimulation is, above all, aimed at eliciting new, expansive forms of agency in subjects. In other words, double stimulation is focused on making subjects masters of their own lives. First, I will present Vygotsky's double stimulation as a theoretical and methodological idea. I will then examine recent notions of “design experiments” and point out some serious limitations in these experiments. Second, I will introduce the Change Laboratory method developed in the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research and used for ten years in formative interventions in workplaces. Third, I will discuss this method as an application and expansion of double stimulation. Fourth, I will demonstrate the practical implementation of Change Laboratory with an example from a project carried out in Finnish post offices. Fifth, I will conclude the chapter with a discussion of some methodological and theoretical implications of the Change Laboratory method for further development of Vygotskian research, especially as it is applied in the context of the workplace and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two of Vygotsky's (1997) central theoretical points are that cultural- historically developed tools mediate the child's relation to the world and that the competence to handle such tools is acquired in social settings through guidance from others. His theory of concept formation for preschoolers, schoolchildren, and adolescents explains how the practice of institutional activities influences children's concept formation (Vygotsky, 1987, 1998a). Small children participate in the everyday activities at home; schoolchildren meet the academic world in school, which he points out as a necessity for schoolchildren's development of scientific concepts; and adolescents get acquainted with the activities in work life, a necessity for their development of dialectical concepts. Vygotsky describes how very young children appropriate concepts of tools and objects through interaction with their caregivers and, as an example, he exemplifies this with how a child learns to use a spoon in interaction with his caregivers (Kravtsov & Berezlizhkaya, 1999). In his theory, Vygotsky characterizes small children's and preschool children's concepts as everyday concepts developed spontaneously in collaboration with others through everyday activities. He contrasts these concepts to schoolchildren's concepts, which he characterizes as scientifically developed through systematic school instruction. Although Vygotsky describes the concept learning of preschool children as inscribed in the social practice of everyday activities, what he primarily draws on when describing preschool children's concept formation is an experiment with the double-stimulation method (Vygotsky, 1987 p. 130ff). In this experiment, children's task is to sort blocks that vary in form, size, and color, gradually finding the sorting principle because a meaningless label is attached to the bottom of each block that is turned over each time the child has chosen one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These two scholars were more than a little acquainted: Vygotsky was Shpet's student at the Shanyavsky People's University, and he attended Shpet's seminar for two years. At the beginning of the 1920s, Vygotsky started to work at the psychological institute where, as Aleksei N. Leont'ev has noted, Shpet was the most famous professor. At the end of the 1920s, Shpet and Vygotsky both taught at the Pedology Department of the Second Moscow University. Despite all these connections, there is only one reference to Shpet in Vygotsky's works (in The Psychology of Art), and even this is only in passing. And Shpet's books Phenomenon and Meaning (1914), Aesthetic Fragments (1922), and The Inner Form of Word (1927), in which he discussed thinking and language, thought and word, meaning and sense, and external and inner forms of a word were all published significantly earlier than Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech (1934). Today, it is hard to guess why Vygotsky and his whole scientific school (Aleksandr R. Luria, A. N. Leont'ev, Aleksandr V. Zaporozhets, and others) ignored Shpet's works. It could have been fear or caution born out of Shpet's style of behavior and writing. This style was characterized by freedom and dignity and the independence of his thought from Marxist-Leninist ideology,which at the time was growing stronger and stronger. The Bolsheviks felt this independence, dismissed Shpet several times from his academic positions, and, in the end, arrested and shot him in 1937. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vygotsky's ideas about culture are of special interest because he attributed such an essential role to culture in human psychological processes. However, any attempt to provide an adequate account of his ideas about culture and human nature faces formidable obstacles. To begin with, the term “culture” is virtually absent from the indexes of his published works. When we delve deeper into his texts, we find culture appearing in three distinctive forms. First, culture defined as artistic products and the processes of creation, appears in such works as The Psychology of Art, as part of Vygotsky's long-standing interest in literary and cultural criticism. This early involvement of culture in Vygotsky's writings (which engaged him in debates with Russian formalists) appears later in his extensive use of literary examples to illustrate the operation of important psychological functions. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and several Russian poets provide important material for his arguments in Thinking and Speech. Second, when we turn to Vygotsky's better-known works on the development of higher psychological functions, culture appears in two related forms. We find it appearing in terms such as “cultural-historical” and “cultural development,” which apply to the way in which the mediation of action through culture is a defining property of human psychological functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many reasons why it is difficult for readers to analyze and to understand Vygotsky's terminology. He developed his psychology in a direct and indirect dialogue with many other authors. In doing so, he absorbed and processed all the ideas and terms that he believed could be useful. These ideas ranged from the philosophy of Spinoza and Marx to the American behaviorism of Watson and the linguistics of Sapir. However, when one meets a seemingly familiar term borrowed from some predecessor in Vygotsky's writings, one should keep in mind that he was likely to have modified the term's meaning. Another motivation for a logico-semantic analysis of Vygotsky's writings is the quantity, variety, and nature of his scientific heritage. A 1960 bibliography of Vygotsky's works includes 274 titles (Vygotsky, 1960). Excluding nonscientific articles and notes devoted for the most part to the events of literary and theatrical life (1916-1923), there remain around 190 works in psychology, written from 1924 until Vygotsky's death (June 11, 1934): a period of only ten years. Many items from this decade were written very quickly, in almost telegraphic style. Some works remain unfinished. It is certainly possible that some of the works that were published posthumously were not yet intended for publication (unfortunately, the editors of contemporary editions do not always warn the reader about the state and nature of the original texts). Therefore, when reading Vygotsky's works one needs to remember his own words (from a letter to A. N. Leontiev dated July 31, 1930), “our writings are imperfect but there is great truth in them. This is my symbol of faith. . . . ” (Vygotsky, 1960, p. 169). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mediation is a theme that runs throughout the writings of Lev Semënovich Vygotsky. In his view, a hallmark of human consciousness is that it is associated with the use of tools, especially “psychological tools” or “signs.” Instead of acting in a direct, unmediated way in the social and physical world, our contact with the world is indirect or mediated by signs. This means that understanding the emergence and the definition of higher mental processes must be grounded in the notion of mediation. Mediation also provides the foundation for another of Vygotsky's theoretical goals, namely, building a link between social and historical processes, on the one hand, and individuals' mental processes, on the other. It is because humans internalize forms of mediation provided by particular cultural, historical, and institutional forces that their mental functioning sociohistorically situated. The importance that Vygotsky attached to mediation is reflected in a lecture he delivered near the end of his life, where he asserted, “A central fact of our psychology is the fact of mediation [oposredovanie]” (Vygotsky, 1982, p. 166). But this is an issue that concerned him from the beginning of his career onward. In a 1930 report on “The Instrumental Method in Psychology,” for example, he focused on the importance of signs as “artificial formations . . . [that] are social, not organic or individual” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 137) and he included under this heading: “language; various systems for counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes, diagrams, maps, and mechanical drawings; all sorts of conventional signs” (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 137). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vygotsky's most popular book in the English-speaking world, Thought and Language, was first published in English in 1962. (It was originally published in Russian in 1934.) When retitled Thinking and Speech in 1987, it captured a more active notion of these interrelated processes. They are seen as activities rather than entities and the book explores the developmentally changing relationship between intellectual and verbal processes. Vygotsky viewed speaking and thinking as dynamically related and approached their connection as “The complex movement from the first vague emergence of the thought to its completion in a verbal formulation. . . . Thought is not expressed but completed in the word. . . . Any thought has movement. It unfolds. . . . This flow of thought is realized as an internal movement through several planes. As a transition from thought to word and from word to thought.” (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 249-250) Thinking and Speech presents important distinctions between communicative language and language used for conceptual representation. By addressing such broad themes, Vygotsky's work was grounded in philosophical, psychological, and linguistic traditions that have influenced Western students of language. Within these disciplines, the relationship between thinking and speech was forged, and it is still of great concern to contemporary thinkers. Part of what is so interesting about revisiting this relationship is that it emerges repeatedly across disciplines and informs every aspect of the human sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity is a key concept in many different fields including psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and cultural studies. At the intersection of these fields, sociocultural research - a recent name for the interdisciplinary approach inspired by the cultural historical work of L. S. Vygotsky and others - is developing its own integrated perspective on identity. In his brief life, Vygotsky wrote down only rudimentary ideas about personality or self. Still, those he did offer, when combined with his general notions of semiotic mediation and higher-order psychological functions, formulate an important nascent understanding of identity formation and its significance for processes of social and cultural change. This chapter examines developments in relevant research and theory that have appeared, for the most part, since William Penuel and James Wertsch's key 1995 article. By adopting an expanded definition of identity, we include a wide range of research, from case studies of individual identity development to analyses of the centrality of identities in mediating response to state projects and to social movements. Concepts of identity are often (although not in Penuel and Wertsch) promiscuously mingled, producing a good bit of confusion and ambiguity. Because we concentrate on the approach to identity associated with George Herbert Mead, rather than following Penuel and Wertsch's focus on Erik Erikson's better-known concept, our first task is to clarify the differences between these two major conceptualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Vygotsky is an original. It is a disservice to him to either find his significance solely in developing Soviet conceptions of man or to render him by gloss translation into language of functionalism or to see only his kinship to George Herbert Mead, to whom he has an interesting resemblance.” (Bruner, 1962, p. vi) / Bruner's description of Vygotsky in his introduction to Thought and Language sets out the challenge to be faced when examining his work alongside that of Mead and of James, Peirce, and Dewey. Vygotsky's unique genius is beyond dispute and Bruner was right to warn against a seductive assimilation of his ideas into the prevailing schema of Western social science. Neither, I would suggest, that Vygotsky's work be tested according to the pragmatic principle of its use to a particular field of study. Therefore, in this chapter there will be some resistance to assimilation by association and to judgments of utility. I will focus on Vygotsky and Mead, separately, as distinct contributors to enduring schools of thought that have much in common but which have developed quite differently. The comparison will, ultimately, lend support to the premise so central to the reflexive form of social science that both espoused: that ideas and, therefore, minds are socially formed and shape the ways in which we act in and on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter examines the philosophical dimensions of Vygotsky's legacy. Vygotsky was a profoundly original thinker, but he was not one whose independence of thought caused him to neglect the ideas of others. On the contrary, Vygotsky was exceptionally well-read. He had an impressive command of the European psychological literature and considerable knowledge of adjacent fields, such as anthropology and educational theory. His appreciation of literature and literary theory is well-known and justly celebrated. Less often remarked upon, however, is his debt to philosophy. In this field, too, he was well-versed, having majored in philosophy and history at the Shanyavsky People's University. Vygotsky was much influenced by the philosophical vision of Marx and Engels: Almost all of the many references to their writings in Vygotsky's Collected Works are to philosophical themes. He was also inspired by a number of philosophers who had influenced Marx and Engels, notably Hegel (whom Vygotsky had read in high school), Spinoza, and Feuerbach. Marxism and its antecedents, however, by no means exhaust Vygotsky's philosophical interests. He cites numerous other philosophers, including Aristotle, Bergson, Brentano, Descartes, Dewey, Dilthey, Fichte, Hobbes, Husserl, James, Kant, Lichtenberg, Malebranche, Nietzsche, Neurath, Plato, and Scheler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a fundamental tenet of Vygotskian theory that in order to understand the inner mental processes of human beings, we must look at human beings in their sociocultural context. We should not look for the explanation of human behavior in the depths of the brain or the soul but in the external living conditions of persons and, most of all, in the external conditions of their societal life - in their social-historical forms of existence (Luria, 1979, p. 23). By accepting this tenet and generalizing it to the understanding of the creative work of investigators, we might say that in order to more fully understand the work of a specific thinker, we should step outside of that thinker's mind and take a look at the broader socioeconomic and sociocultural background in which he or she worked. The researcher's private abilities and preferences undoubtedly play a role in the creation of major theories, but the shaping of character, inclinations, and abilities of the researcher takes place in a specific sociocultural context, and every scientist is dependent on the ideas and tools available in his or her time. There is no true understanding of an investigator's theories, then, without an assessment of the broad context in which the theories were created (cf. Van der Veer, 1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L. S. Vygotsky was an early twentieth-century Russian psychologist whose writing exerts a significant influence on the development of social theory in the early years of the twenty-first century. The greater part of his legacy was produced in the 10 years that preceded his death in 1934. It now influences a wide range of disciplines and professions. His nondeterministic, nonreductionist account of the formation of mind provides current theoretical developments with a broadly drawn, yet very powerful sketch of the ways in which humans shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and historical conditions. As David Bakhurst notes in Chapter 2, Vygotsky insisted that in order to understand the mature human mind, we must comprehend the processes from which it emerges. These ideas were originally forged at a time of rapid and intense social upheaval following the Russian Revolution. They were developed by a scholar who was charged with developing a state system for the education of “pedagogically neglected” children (Yaroshevsky, 1989, p. 96). This group included the homeless, of which there were a very large number. Thus, he was working at a time of profound social change (which was influenced by the Soviet adaptation of Marxist theory to social and political practice) and also working with a group of people who had profoundly different cultural experiences from “mainstream” members of society. He sought ways of intervening in the lives of these young people that would either compensate for or ameliorate their experience of marginalization. Consequently, it is, in some way, unsurprising that he should have attempted to develop a theory of social, cultural, and historical formation of the human mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]