Previous Issues - August 2014

The Personal, the Collective, and the Cultural: Introduction to the Special Issue
PATRICK BYERS

A central task for psychology is to conceptualize the relation between people, social worlds, and culture. This special issue contains articles that do just this. From a primarily socio-cultural orientation, these articles address questions that range from how collectively available cultural forms are made meaningful by the individual to critical examinations of the concept of the individual from psychology.

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Exploring the Intersection of Personal and Collective Meanings: ‘Responsibility’ in the Transition to Adulthood
ELSA DE MATTOS & ANGELA BRANCO

In this study, we depart from the perspectives of the cultural psychology and dialogical self theory, and explore how a young woman navigates into collective culture and constructs a new personal meaning of herself as a “responsible person”. We investigate how the value of ‘responsibility’ becomes progressively integrated into her personal system of values.

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Children and the meanings of work: between personal culture and collective culture
LIA DA ROCHA LORDELO

This investigation is oriented by sociocultural psychology and has arisen from empirical research on meanings of work for children from different cultural contexts. A guiding theoretical question was: “how do people (children) create, maintain and transform knowledge that belongs both to individual cognition and to a sociocultural domain?”

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Relations Between the Individual and the Socio-­Cultural: The ZPD and the ZPWE and the Philosophy of Second Hand Knowledge
JOSEPH GLICK

This article traces differing patterns of conceptualizing the relationship between the individual and the socio-cultural conceptions of development as they are seen through the lens of three conceptual frameworks: the cognitive-developmental, the dialogical, and the activity-participatory. In addition, it examines the ways in which these conceptualizations are related in the development, both within and between, various theoretical orientations to the analysis of development, as they have emerged in recent years.

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Me:We – Dynamic Interplay between the Individual and the Collective in Rap and Hip Hop Dance Narratives
DEBANGSHU ROYCHOUDHURY & LAUREN M. GARDNER

This paper compares urban minoritized youth in two different locations within the United States through two different mediums of Hip Hop culture: rap and Hip Hop dance. We seek to understand how youth navigate development of self vis a vie community across different genres of Hip Hop.

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Time! For Engaged Psychology to Integrate Personal and Collective Development: Commentary on Glick (2014), De Mattos and Branco (2014), Lordelo (2014) and Roychoudhury and Gardner (2014).
COLETTE DAIUTE

This commentary identifies three theoretical tenets highlighted across four articles in this issue, discusses how the research presented in each article enacts those tenets, and then proposes the practice of engaged research as an important next step for research with such foundational tenets.  

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Two Conceptual Systems for Making Sense of the Individual Person in Psychology
PATRICK BYERS

This paper examines two contrasting approaches to conceptualizing the person in psychology. In the causal-mechanical approach, folk psychological concepts are assumed to be physical objects, mechanisms or causal processes that operate in and around the human organism. The second approach, social-constructionism, treats the individual as a sign produced through certain forms of material-discursive activity. These two approaches are often portrayed as in opposition to one another. However, if the conceptual confusion that frequently plagues them is eliminated, they have potential to be integrated into a broad theoretical system.

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