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Brian Cox and Cynthia Lightfoot have done a highly creditable job in making sure that those who missed the SRCD presentation in 1993(?) now have available a first-rate collection.
—British Journal of Developmental Psychology
The discovery of Vygotsky's work rates amongst the most significant developments in psychology in the second half of the 20th century. However, the insight that persons as psychological beings are socially created can be taken in more than one way. In this collection of studies, the growing independence of the individual from its sociogenetic environment through Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is highlighted as 'internalization'. The division of the collection into reports of work on how symbolic acts are internalized has allowed the authors to cover a great deal of ground from basic structures of moral intuitions to the conceptual foundations of adolescent ways of life.
The book is timely indeed, presenting solid empirical work tracing the growth of competence through detailed analysis of the activities in the zone of proximal development to complement what until recently has been a predominantly theoretical literature. The breadth of the work described here illustrates the extraordinary range of possibilities opened up by the sociogenetic approach. It is also important as a corrective to what I believe has been an unwise deletion of a robust sense of personal identity from the foundations of psychology.
There continue to be tensions within the generally Vygotskian way of looking at development, and a great virtue of this book is the editors' willingness to confront and resolve some of them. Personal agency and activity cannot give way to a wholly socially driven account of action. In the end, there is no favored directionality in person-culture relations because each is a dynamically shaped product of the other. I am confident that this collection will have a powerfully stimulating effect on developmental studies because it not only brings to light the creative tensions that are to be seen in the approach, but demonstrates the illuminating qualities of the insights that can be drawn from it.
—Rom Harre
Linacre College, Oxford, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Lightfoot and Cox have put together a volume on one of the most important issues in the human sciences today, and they have done so by including some of the best minds on the topic. The authors in this volume have made a particularly important contribution by clarifying the notion of internalization from various sociogenetic perspectives. I do not think we will have any final answers to our questions about internalization in the near future, but I do think that this volume will frame the next round of debate in an important and productive way.
—James V. Wertsch
Washington University, St. Louis
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