Discursive Cultural Psychology: The concept of action

This article is an opening of a collection of articles on discursive cultural psychology. The collection is adapted from theoretical foundation of my dissertation work in 2001. At that time I was analyzing complex problem solving group conversations, both Germans and Indonesians to identify culture-general and culture-specific speech-act sequences that may lead to complex problem solving effectiveness. The summary of the research result can be read in my blog article CANONICAL SPEECH-ACT SEQUENCES IN COMPLEX PROBLEM SOLVING ACTIVITIES.

The collection table of contents:
1.  Discursive Cultural Psychology: The concept of action
2.  Parsons theory of action, and its critiques
3. Common-Sense World and Stock of Knowledge at Hand
4. Context-constitutedness of Action: Leontiev's Theory of Activity
5. Constitutive Rules and Action
6. Searle’s Speech Act Theory 
7. Approaches to Discourse
8. Discourse as conversational joint activity
9. Harvey Sacks' Conversation Analysis

The theoretical foundation part is basically a critique of positivist psychology, and more specifically of cross-cultural psychology. It is an effort to build a psychology that put the culture and practice at the center of the approach. I argue that the effort to build a psychological theory should start from understanding human practice as text in its cultural contexts.

We shall start with investigating the notion of action as it is used in cultural psychology (Boesch, 1990; Thomas, 1999; Cole, 1996; Wertsch, 1981, 1985), and in weberian sociology (Winch, 1958; Schütz, 1967; Parsons, 1949). The next step is to discuss the notion of speech as action (Searle, 1969; 1979; 1983; 1996), which is brought further to the notion of discourse (van Dijk, 1972; 1980; 1985; 1997), as sequence of action (Sacks, 1989; Garfinkel, 1967).

The notion of culture will appear only later after we have discussed the notion of action and speech. One important notion that underlies the previous three notions (action, speech, and culture) is the notion of pragmatic meaning. Thus, as we shall later conclude, culture is the meaning system in which action and speech is constituted. Action and speech, being detached from the meaning system in which they occur is inconceivable.

The Concept of Action

The decision to start building cultural psychology with the concept of action is not accidental. One may wonder, why not start with the concept of culture that is more obviously an integral part of cultural psychology? There are two reasons. First, as is the case of the culture concept, the concept of action is an important part of cultural psychology.

Cultural psychologies make use of action (Handlung), in contrast to behavior, as their basic unit of analysis (Boesch, 1991; Wertsch, 1981; 1985; Leontiev, 1981; Straub, 1999). Some authors have even considered it constitutive in defining cultural psychology. This is expressed for example by Bruner (1990, p.19) who wrote:”A cultural psychology, almost by definition, will not be preoccupied with behavior but with action..” Moreover Eckensberger (1991, p.3) also wrote that ”there exists an intrinsic relationship between human subjects (agencies), actions, and culture... all of these aspects are essentially interdependent,...and they require each other’s existence.” From these quotes, it is obvious that the concept of action is considered as an important and integral part of cultural psychology.

Secondly, in contrast to the concept of culture, the authors of cultural psychology more or less agree in defining what action is. What differentiates action from behavior is that the former always involves intentional elements along with its occurrence (Straub, 1999; Leontiev, 1981; Bruner, 1990; Boesch, 1991; Harré, 1982; Searle, 1983). There are no actions without intentions. These intentional elements comprise mainly of the notions of directedness or in general, aboutness (Searle, 1983).

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